Posted by Roland Tanglao on 7/23/02; 10:44:24 PM
From the Restaurants dept.
I thought it was strange that we went to a Chinese Hot Pot restaurant for Chinese fondue in the middle of Vancouver's summer heatwave.
However, after thoroughly enjoying our meal tonight at Grand Honour Hot Pot Restaurant (5668 Granville Street, 604 263 3988), it doesn't seem strange at all in retrospect.
I have never had Chinese Fondue before, but my first Chinese fondue was a treat. Instead of dipping cheese and meat into hot oil or cheese, you dip fish, meats, dumplings, seafood and vegetables into pots of steaming broth.
I loved dipping the thinly cut fish, and meats (pork, beef, lamb) , dumplings (shrimp dumplings, chive dumplings, beef balls and various tasty won tons) and vegetables (spinach, lettuce and water cress) into the four steaming pots (on top of a burner to keep it steaming) of broth that we shared. Barb loved dipping the deep fried fish skin into the broth as well. This sounds very challenging but it was very much like pork rinds and just as much of a guilty pleasure!
I especially loved the pepper and pork stomach broth! This seemed like a strange combination to my non Chinese sensibilities, but it has a lovely light flavour punctuated by awesome bursts of pepper flavour. It was great sipping this broth after we had finished dunking our meat, dumplings and vegetables.
If you don't like the sound of pepper and pork stomach, they have other less challenging broths (a total of 12!) to dunk your dinner into such as miso, tomato and potato, a very spicy broth, fish broth, consommé, satay, etc.
We will be back with a full report. In the meantime, I suggest you try it out. If you (like myself) are not Chinese, I recommend that you do what I did. Bring a Chinese person to give you the insider scoop on what to order as this seems to be one of those restaurants that doesn't really cater to non-Chinese people but is well worth it!
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