Haidilao 海底捞 @ Sembawang

You’ve probably been living under a rock if you haven’t heard of Haidilao 海底捞, the Chinese hotpot chain that takes customer service to a new level. But gone are the long queues as more chains pop up with newer concepts. These days they have to improve and fight harder for your patronage.

Everything that make Haidilao special – like free manicure while you are waiting for the long queue for tables to turn; like the sauce bar and unlimited fruits and appetisers and desserts; like free drinks and snacks and table games if you do not want a manicure – was empty when we went there on a weekday afternoon.

They are still the yardstick of service quality in F&B. The overzealous waitress that served our table, and the constant activities around the restaurant are what makes coming to Haidilao an enjoyable experience all the time.

You can choose one soup, 2 soups, or 4 soups. And like our case, we chose 3 soups, with a repeat of one of the three soups.

They have introduced premium options for the choices of soup, and for the extra cost, these soup bases like pig stomach chicken soup 猪肚鸡火锅 and fish maw chicken soup 花胶鸡火锅 now come with additional ingredients in the soup.

The self-service condiment bar is a wonderful feature of these Chinese-style hotpot restaurants. We could go and mix and match our favourite condiments to make our own unique sauces and dips. Haidilao was the one that brought it to Singapore almost 12 years ago.

Before Haidilao, sauces were only chopped chilli in soy sauce, and house made chilli mix. Since then, we would mix tahini, seafood sauce, beef sauce, shacha sauce in any way we want.

I like the option to order half a portion, so you can order a lot more variety. Another small detail was the service to peel the shell of prawns for you. Call me lazy, but don’t you miss this part of the meal 😉

But some of the origins of the premium meat choices, like the A5 Wagyu, they could not really tell where it was from.

The dancing ramen was also a must order for its entertainment value. But the value and standard have dropped over the years and we are better off with their instant noodles. They recently introduced the sushi bar (with additional cost) but I find that a horrible business idea. Firstly, if you eat sushi you have less room for the rest of the hotpot, so your revenue for hotpot goes down. Secondly, you are not an expert in sushi, so the sushi could not be any good, so your brand value goes down.

Everything else was the same – good value, excellent service and the same simple tastes of hotpot. I was just disappointed that the laksa and bak kut teh soup base options were no longer available and there’s a new entrant in the market that offered that.

And if you are celebrating an occasion, they will also go the extra mile to make it a memorable one.

海底捞 Haidilao Hot Pot @ Sun Plaza
30 Sembawang Dr, #02-01 Sun Plaza, Singapore 757713

Visited Feb 2025