Meals Stack HK Hotpot 膳栈打边炉 @ Shenzhen (2023)

Some F&B establishments went out of business during the pandemic years, but tough ones get going. This is one of those that survived and thrived against the adversaries.

When I first discovered Meals Stack HK Hotpot in 2020, the eatery was run by a husband-wife team, with the husband running in the back in the small kitchen churning out all these goodies. The wife ran the front with two helpers, straddling around 10 tables.

Fast forward to 2023, they have done very well, expanding to two more shops in the same street, and another more fancy branch on the main street. But I am still nostalgic with this original place.

This time I ordered a starter because we had to wait for our casserole (knowing that from the last trip here), and it didn’t disappoint. The fish skin salad was made with boiled carp fish skin that was really crunchy and not fishy. It was flavoured with chilli, vinegar, sesame oil and other aromatics just like you would a regular vegetable salad. Served cold, it would be perfect with beer.

The cuisine on offer is HK-style hotpot called Dabinlou 打边炉 or “hitting the side of the stove”. It refers to the action of taking raw ingredients and slapping them in the boiling pot of stock. The common hotpot features a metal pot on a stove. The traditional HK hotpot uses an earthen stove with burning charcoal with a claypot.

We ordered the usual, the sea whelk and chicken casserole as the base. It came with half a chicken cooked in a rich, sticky stock that included sea whelk for that umami.

And besides the main claypot feature, you order additional ingredients to your fancy to be added into the claypot. Unlike the more traditional hotpot, you don’t drink the soup because it is overwhelmingly rich and heavy. The idea is to slowly swoosh the ingredients into the stock and let the flavours work their magic on the ingredients.

And to round up the dinner, we ordered a claypot rice with Chinese pork sausage (called lapcheong 腊肠, the red ones) and liver sausage (ruencheong 润肠, the darker ones). I was surprised how good it was. We couldn’t finish it and therefore we packed most of it home. They tasted even better when we reheated them the next day.

If you do not know what is lapcheong, it’s the Chinese version of salami except that it has a sharper taste from the rice wine and rose water. The ruencheong had the savoury and satisfying taste of offals in a sausage and the rice wine that was used provided a nice aroma to the air-dried sausage.

Reading the online comments, many have complained about the drop in standard, the level of hygiene and the bad service. We encountered all of the above, but the main pot was still as delicious as ever and only authentic HK-style hotpot in Shenzhen.

Meals Stack HK Hotpot 膳栈打边炉
水围街水围村251号
Tel : (0755) 82553992

Visited Aug 2023

#打边炉 #HKHotpot #Shenzhen