F F HOTPOT 340-344 Marsh Road Wan Chai Tel: 2838-9392 Open: 11am-4.30am F F Hotpot can be considered one of the first hotpot places to be daring enough to offer spicy broth, which now seems to be trendy all over Hong Kong.
Although the restaurant, at the junction of Marsh Road and Jaffe Road (another outlet in Hanoi Road, Tsim Sha Tsui, recently closed down), has touted its soup as Taiwanese ma lat ('numbingly spicy'), it is less pungent than the original ma lat soups, but maintains enough spice to keep hot-blooded diners happy.
As with most hotpot places, diners have a choice of broths: spicy, clear soup, or the coriander soup with century egg. They sometimes offer more exotic ginseng soup for adventurous diners.
The best part about eating in F F Hotpot is mixing the condiments into the soy sauce. Each table is supplied with a tray containing small bowls of stir-fried garlic, raw garlic, spring onions, ginger, sliced chilli, chilli sauce, and scallop in chilli sauce.
You take what you like and mix it into the soy sauce, for a create-your-own dipping sauce.
The spicy soup has been rather inconsistent in recent months, sometimes excellent and sometimes more like pepper soup than ma lat. However, the non-spicy soups are always a good bet.
