WARNING: do not reply to this post directly. In order to find my real email address, you'll have to take a powder. After a hungry weekend of snatching chips and dip from the hospitality suite so that I didn't have to leave the convention hotel more than once a day for food, I was ready for some serious chow by the time we called a dinner break. Right across the street was Milpitas Square, which I already knew was blessed with a very tasty and fairly priced Japanese sushi boat restaurant, and a wide assortment of other places at which to sample Oriental cuisine. I was tempted by the Pho (beef bowl) place, and a re-run of the sushi joint might have been nice, but I was also hungry enough that when I found the Hot Pot City restaurant, I figured it would be a great place to bring the appetite. For folks who haven't yet been to one of these (usually) fun and tasty joints, this is a restaurant concept that is just catching on in the Bay area where you get a grill and a pot full of boiling water at your table, and a huge bar of raw ingredients. I love Encore Hot Pot City in Berkeley, at University and Shattuck. I've turned dozens of friends on to the place, and I've always enjoyed their assortment of goodies from tofu and rice noodles and delicate seafood to unabashed red meat. I also love wierd ingredients, but cubed blood and tripe are the only really interesting things that show up at the hot pot place in Berkeley. So I figured this hot pot restaurant, located in a neighborhood full of diverse ethnic cuisine, would be a good one for a pleasant tasting course of the more interesting ingredients. I wasn't disappointed with the variety of ingredients, and noted with pleasure the chopped small intestines, pork maws and sliced liver, as well as the standard chicken, lamb and pork. I piled my plate moderately high with goodies and headed for the grill. And now the disappointment: the meat was *not* fresh. Like, drastically not so. I don't mind gamy lamb, but this was beyond gamy and all the way into soured. The pork was mushy, the chicken tasted wierd and the first whiff of the liver and the intestines nearly made me gag - they literally smelled like shit. I love liver, and I really like Chinese style fried or boiled small intestines; they are cartilaginously crunchy and delicious, so this wasn't a case of squeamishness on my part about the product. This was just inedible. The crowning touch were the vegetables. Most of them were fresh; the napa cabbage and the watercress was nice and crisp, so I figured that a pile of green and piece or two of the corn would be a good consolation since the meat had proven nearly inedible. And here the piece de resistance. Biting into the corn, I groaned in annoyance - it was milky, soured, nasty, tasting like it had spent a little too long over a warm steam table and had fermented. I put it back down on the plate, and that's when I noticed that I had competition for the food. A creature with too many legs had died there on the grill, and its corpse waved up at me feebly from between two kernels. I figured that it was welcome to the rest of my plate, since I definitely didn't want any more. I asked the manager to please remove the offending item from my plate, and he apologized. I indicated my displeasure with the meal and my lack of appetite for any more food, so he brought me the check. Which was not adjusted in any manner. I paid, and even left a small tip, as I don't believe the busboys were responsible for the quality of the meal - but I will *never* return to that vile and unclean place. I spent the rest of the evening grabbing handfuls of munchies from the convention hospitality suite to make up for the dinner I hadn't gotten much of, and took out my satisfaction in full by writing this review. ;) Avoid this restaurant. It is located in Milpitas, California, in the San Francisco South Bay, across from the Milpitas Holiday Inn. There are numerous other places to eat immediately next door, and while I didn't get a chance to visit them all, I doubt that any of them could have equalled this one in the sheer, awesome badness of the total restaurant experience. Regards, Tanith Tyrr *************************************************************************** "As viscous as motor oil swirled in a swamp, redolent of burnt bell peppers nested in by incontinent mice and a finish reminiscent of the dregs of a stale can of Coca-Cola that someone has been using as an ashtray. Not a bad drink, though." - Excerpt from "The Moose Turd Wine Tasting" by T. A. Nonymous ****************************************************************************
San Francisco Bay Area, CA