Red and Hot Restaurant

First week of the year is always a bit depressing, you had the nice relaxing Christmas and new year break but now its 4 months of wintery hell until the next Bank Holiday.

The cold dark days are enough to drive any insane but just try having to deal with a company yearend accounting as well!  Everyone in my department (Finance) had been working really hard over the last few weeks and the hours have been really long to get the yearend numbers finalised.  At times like these there is really on one thing that you can turn to…KARAOKE baby!

Before hitting the karaoke bar we had to have some food first.  We headed to one of the newish favourites in town, the Red and Hot Szechuan restaurant on Charing Cross road.  Since opening a couple of years ago the restaurant has become a big attraction among the Chinese community in the UK.  It’s speciality – hotpot!

What is a Chinese hotpot?  Well… basically it’s a big pot of boiling soup which presented in the middle of the table along with a selection of meat, seafood and vegetables.  The diners dip the food that they want to eat in the boiling soup and take it out once it’s cooked.  There’re various sauces you can put your food in to serve.

Chinese hotpot - clear and spicy soup

As most of my colleagues haven’t done hotpot before, I suggested we order hotpot and some signature Szechuan dishes.  The hotpot at Red and Hot came as a buffet and it consists of beef, lamb, ham, white fish slices, squids, mushrooms, Chinese vegetables, tofu, seaweed and potatoes.  For £20 per head and you could eat as much as you like, I thought it was a pretty good deal.  Oh and at Red and Hot, you could choose your base soup, be it clear (which is the traditional Beijing style) or spicy (Szechuan style) or you could order both.  We ordered both so they came in a bowl with a division in the middle to separate the two soup base.

Food for hotpot

We also ordered Dry Fried Chicken on the Bone in Red & Green Chilli, Gong Bao King Prawn with Peanuts, Sliced Fish with pickled vegetables soup.

Spicy chicken

Fish and pickled veg soup

Kong Po Prawns

By the end of the meal, we were all stuffed.  The highlights for me were the chicken and prawn dishes.  The hotpot was good for UK standard as I don’t think you could get a better valued place.  However, being a traditionist I wouldn’t be rushing back as my mum makes a better Beijing hotpot at home and the Szechuan soup was too hot for my liking.

Having added more junk to all our trunks – the only thing to do was to blast out some bootylicious tunes!

…. “Ken Leeeeeeeeeee…. jibul jibi dow choooo,   KEN LEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE…. “

Just be thankful this is not a video blog!