My daughter took my wife, my wife's sister and me to SoupBelly Hotpot in Glenview Illinois for lunch today. I ordered the #10 Spicy Korean Flower Crab with medium spicy soup and rice on the side.
While the soup was fine, the service was a bit off. The Indian waiter seemed nice enough and would promise to get us water and get me another empty bowl to put my crab shells, but he never actually did it! We found that he would take our requests for water or sauces (they were all pretty much empty), but he never followed through with doing what he said he would do! We ended up getting our own water from some water pitchers on a cart (twice) and I had to ask another waitress for the bowl. And come on... cheap plastic cup for water? Can't they invest in a little better cups for water for their customers?! You can see the kind of cup I'm talking about in the photo above.
We were also surprised that they were out of sesame sauce that they had on the tables along with other sauces. In fact, each sauce container hardly had any sauces left in them, but when we asked for some more sesame sauce, the waiter checked in the kitchen and came back to say that the manager told him that they had run out. So he grabbed another container from another table and gave it to us. That was empty too. Sesame sauce is one of the "staples" for a hotpot restaurant, so to be "out of it" is really inexcusable.
One of the jobs that the waiter has to do is to light the fuel at the bottom of the "hot pot" but my daughter's hot pot flame went out. She asked for him to re-light it and he said he would, but he didn't come back to do it. So she got up to ask if he could just give her the lighter, but he said that he was just going to swap out the hotpot, which he did.
We all asked that there be no green onions or jalapeños in our soup, but when mine came out, I had both. I asked that they take it out, be the others later told me to just do it myself since the service was so spotty and it would just take them longer to do it.
Not a good experience at this restaurant in terms of service, but the food wasn't too bad. It was spicy, but there wasn't much substance to it for the price. Only two shrimps in my bowl and while it came with two small blue crabs, I just could not eat them at the restaurant. With so much soup base and really nowhere to "work on" taking the crab apart without splashing soup all over me or the table, I decided to just bring it all home and eat it later. So all I ate while at the restaurant was one shrimp and the tofu and some vegetables that were in the soup. The soup was really spicy and the medium spicy option was a bit too much for me especially since the soup was kept boiling by the hot pot. I decided to turn off the hot pot's flame just to cool off the soup.
Will we be going back? No. None of us enjoyed the service although the waiter was nice enough, he just didn't do what he promised he'd do. The food was ok, but nothing special and definitely lacking in quantity for the price. While I'm sure it's fine for some people, it just didn't impress us. At home, I ate the rest of the soup and the crabs, but the crabs really had no meat on them at all.
While the restaurant is called a "Hot Pot" restaurant, this really wasn't a true hot pot restaurant. True hot pot means having a boiling soup base and then giving the customers raw meats and vegetables to cook themselves in the hot pot soup base. It's usually an "all-you-can-eat" affair, but here, it's not. Here, I'd say it's "spicy soup with ingredients inside a bowl" that is kept hot with a burner. It's just a soup place. Not a hotpot place.
I was really hoping that this restaurant would be good, but none of us was impressed enough to say we'd go back. This is a really small restaurant with very few tables. We just could not figure out why it was so hard for him to take care of just a few customers.
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