WHEN Lin Kee Hot Pot first opened its doors in Hong Kong more than a year ago, many doubted it would survive. Those who had visited the restaurant's Taipei branches were only too aware of how numbingly spicy its soup can be. It is a flavour that Cantonese cuisine can never prepare Hong Kongers for.
As in Taiwan, Lin Kee in Hong Kong has had to cater to more popular tastes and offer a mixed soup base of spicy soup on one side and clear soup on the other for those who do not want to numb their lips.
With the cooler season setting in, more people tend to gravitate towards hot-pot meals so there was a full crowd when we arrived.
It is a popular restaurant, especially since they recently introduced an all-you-can-eat price of $85 per head, although there is an extra charge for some special items.
The main difference between the spicy soup base ($50) at Lin Kee and most other places is that it comes with tofu and duck's blood, both of which absorb the full flavour of the spice.
The original Lin Kee soup - which comes in three degrees of spiciness - is made essentially to go with beef, so the first things we ticked off on the Chinese menu were the beef sinews and tripe. We chose the better-quality American fatty beef for which we had to pay an extra $68 a plate.
Not to be missed is the house speciality: mushroom balls ($28 a plate), a mixture of mashed pork and mushroom. We rounded off our selection with the usual hot-pot ingredients: fried tofu, fish and chicken slices, Japanese and Chinese mushrooms, prawn dumplings, goose intestines, gluten, vegetables and noodles. We found nothing to complain about with these.
