The boyfriend and I were driving in Richmond and stumbled onto this place. From its name I was expecting a no-frills, frugal hot pot place, but was totally wrong.

I was thrown off. The concept of AYCE hot pot here is a little bit different, but cool. Unlike the conventional hotpot place, every customer receives an individual hotpot (no fighting over what kind of broth!). Also, there's a little sauce bar where you can combine a plethora of ingredients to make your own custom sauce (think buffet line, or Mongolie grill). I get to make my sauce exactly how I want it!.

The restaurant's concepts are excellent, but I could not say the same about the actual food.

We shared a pitcher of lemon iced tea (which was sadly made from a powder mix), a Kimchi broth, and the house special broth. The meat slices were distastefully un-fresh, and their dumplings were extremely small and weird tasting. The vegetables weren't too fresh either. Everything else was at best mediocre.

Our server was nice. She knew that it was our first time here, and warned us when she worried we had ordered too much noodles. After that, she regularly checked up on us with smiles.

I know that you can't expect quality foods for AYCE, but some of these dishes were noticeably worse than their AYCE counterparts. Thus, if their food was at least mediocre, I would recommend this place. But it's not, so I don't.