First impressions of The Drunken Pot in Causeway Bay – spoilt for choice
The second outpost of this hotpot chain offers new soup bases and penguin-shaped fish balls, although beef and cheese dumplings with black truffle didn’t quite hit the mark. And don’t forget to leave room for dessert
We visited for dinner about a week after it opened and the restaurant had yet to receive its liquor licence. Nevertheless, we enjoyed the experience thanks to the enthusiastic and helpful service.
There’s a large tray on each table filled with condiments so diners can personalise their dipping sauce by adding ingredients to the soy sauce, including minced garlic, deep-fried garlic chips, peanut sauce, coriander and fresh chillies.
You pick items by ticking the boxes on the menu, and there is so much to choose from it can be hard to figure out how much to order.
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The first order of business is to choose the soup base. We decided to try one of the new offerings: The Ultimate Drunken Pot (HK$328), featuring four soup bases – lobster with black truffle and cheese, fish maw and chicken, bak kut teh, and Sichuan-style numbingly spicy.
The staff advised us not cook ingredients in the lobster cheese pot, but use it as a dip for meats. The Sichuan one looked too fiery, so we cooked most of the ingredients in the bak kut teh, which had a subtle medicinal smell, and the fish maw with chicken, which supposedly gave us a collagen boost.
Some new menu items include the penguin-shaped fish balls (HK$88) which had a squid-ink taste from the black covering.
We liked the dumpling stuffed with black truffles, beef and cheese (HK$88) even though the cheese was not very gooey when cooked and we couldn’t detect the black truffle taste. Razor clams (HK$68) were fantastic when quickly poached, with their slightly crunchy texture.
Other items we ordered included local hand-cut beef (HK$238) and the Mongolian mutton (HK$68), which didn’t have a particularly strong taste. We also tried the soft bean curd (HK$28), spinach (HK$32), tribute or emperor vegetable (HK$32), and the sweetcorn (HK$28).
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We barely managed to finish these dishes but somehow found room for the matcha lava cake dessert (HK$98)– it wasn’t too sweet, and included a scoop of vanilla ice cream and balls of honeydew melon.
The Drunken Pot, 27/F, V Point, 18 Tang Lung Street, Causeway Bay, tel: 2323 7098