As you may know, I’ve been on a healthy eating kick for the past few episodes of Eating with john Chow. Well, that all came to an end today with our lunch at Happy Dining in Irvine, California.
Happy Dining is just a few door away from Pho Ba Co, which is the location for our Saturday Dot Com Lunch meetup. Happy is a Sinseollo Hot Pot restaurant. Sinseollo means pot or food of the mountain gods.
Traditional Sinseollo is prepared in a special cooking pot that combines a stove and pot in one. The pot looks something like a bundt pan with a stand, but the hole in the center has a bottom and a hot fire is placed in the hole to heat the dish. Later variations were adapted for gas burners or sterno like containers.
The hot pots at Happy Dining are made with mostly the same veggies (potato, celery, cauliflower, soybean sprout, and cilantro). The main difference is the protein. Diners can choose from a wide ranges of meats from pork feet, to beef tendon, to squid. The pots are prepared to four levels of heat: plain, mild, medium, and very spicy. We went with the medium and it was damn hot! The hotness wasn’t the kind that burns. Rather it was the type that numbs your tongue and makes you sweat. We were sweating up a storm after just a few minutes. We can’t imagine how much hotter the very spicy is. First time diners may want to start off with the mild or plain hot pots.
Prices at Happy Dining are extremely reasonable. Our two hot pots cost $9.99 each, and had more food than we can finish. However, the milk tea was kinda on the expensive side at $3.25. Overall, we thought Happy Dining provided a great dining experience at a great price.
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