Coriya Hot Pot City: Skip the Beef, You'll Be Fine
Written: Jan 02 '01 (Updated Feb 04 '03)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: The Variety!
Cons: The Beef -- eccch!
The Bottom Line: Ummmmm. Skip the beef.
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| megugrrrl's Full Review: Coriya Hot Pot City |
How can a place where you get to cook your own food over an open flame – and be all-you-can-eat even, be so terribly disappointing!? I was recently left disappointed; even the high novelty factor and substantial variety offered couldn’t help the food. I asked myself these questions, trying to figure out just where Coriya Hot Pot City went wrong – so very wrong – when it had all the elements of a beautiful eating experience.
My friend had hyped this restaurant up for months – describing it as a combination Japanese shabu-shabu joint / Korean Barbecue place. It’s really quite neither – it’s just another restaurant that has co-opted the term “Pan-Asian”. (I do believe it’s a Taiwanese restaurant -- despite the giant Korean flag on the epinions page -- that has Japanese sushi, Indonesian satay sauce, and Korean BBQ sauce.)
Basically, once you’re shown to your table, you get up and forage for raw food from the buffet tables (there had to be over 50 items) then cook it. There are several buffet tables laden with the barbecue staples: like meat (small pieces of beef, pork, chicken), seafood (squid, mussels), and vegetables (spinach, bok choy, baby corn, mushrooms). Another table is devoted for things to dump into the hot pot, offering various fish cakes, various egg and rice noodles, and greens. The variety is pretty impressive – it goes beyond your run of the mill Asian food -- they have things like dehydrated tofu, whole prawns, organ meats and fish balls (not those kind).
After you’ve collected your basics, you head for the marinade/dipping sauce station, which is also very impressive – you can follow one of the their ‘recipes’ or create your own – Korean barbecue, teriyaki, satay… You can tweak your sauce by adding extras like grated ginger, garlic, sugar or sesame oil. It’s really neat. (While some of the beef already comes marinated, you can use these sauces to flavor up other things either before, during, or after cooking.)
There’s also a really small salad bar, offering traditional salad faire – and they have a sushi section, which you need to stay away from. It was dry, way too much vinegar, the nori was chewy and the rice was pasty. (Generally speaking, sushi at a buffet is not very good.)
I think one of the neatest things is that they have a pot of warm tea eggs, which are basically hardboiled eggs cooked in tea. When you peel the shell off, it reveals a beautiful antique brown pattern on the outside of the egg; the tea stains. The other neat thing is the beverage station – you have to fetch your own sodas – but you also have the opportunity to get one of those Milk Tea Jumbo Pearl drinks! They have a dispenser for the cold milky tea, and a bowl full of giant dark tapioca balls that you can scoop in – that and they have those industrial sized-straws…
Once you have everything you find your way back to your table. A section of our table had been cut out of the middle and in it was this gas powered grill. On top of this is your hot pot, which resembles a giant bundt cake pan – there’s a boiling broth and the base of the pot extends out (this is where you get to fry stuff in butter – yup, butter) and is wrapped in foil. You also get a pair of metal tongs to help you cook whatever you’ve collected. I’ve been to a lot of places where you cook your own food – and the splatter factor at Coriya Hot Pot City is pretty high, so watch out and be thankful for the tongs.
Now you’re probably wondering the same thing I was – how can a place that has so much to offer be so disappointing? I can wrap it up in two words. The meat.
I don’t care how authentic, how clean, how friendly, how many bells and whistles a restaurant has – if the quality of one of the main menu offerings is substandard – it brings the whole restaurant down. The beef, this particular night, at Coriya Hot Pot City was tough – leather tough – even when it was sliced as thin as paper, it was like eating salty beef jerky – and as appetizing as the dipping / marinating sauces sound – they’re not – the salt masks the garlic, cilantro, ginger, and whatever treasures you had picked up earlier. The beef also tasted ‘off’ – it was just low-quality. We got a lot of aforementioned beef and didn’t eat it – and were super glad they didn’t slap us with the $3 charge – there are signs all over that reveal this charge if you're caught wasting food.
But wait, all is not lost. You can actually have a good dining experience and make use of the gigantic variety of food -- if you stay away from the beef – if you fill yourself up on squid, imitation crab, mussels in their shells, chicken, egg noodles, and very interesting hot dogs on sticks.
At $12 a head for dinner (minimum of two people per table allowed), it’s a pretty good deal… however, I can’t recommend a restaurant that has beef this bad.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
megugrrrl
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Location: Oakland
Reviews written: 147
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