Palace Garden Hot Pot 京通南门涮肉 @ Beijing

What a difference a signboard makes. This is one specialty of Beijing that I would go to every time I am back in the capital of China. Although it says “南门涮肉”, it is however not the real deal.

After a day in the Forbidden City, we took a shuttle bus to Houhai for dinner. I thought it would be great to have dinner by the lakeside and walk around the artificial lake after dinner. Princess wanted to try the Beijing hotpot and we found a “South Gate” hotpot in Houhai.

Unfortunately all the tables by the lakeside are large tables for 4 or more people. We are given a table for two in the inside of the restaurant. Well, we were hungry and tired and not thought too much about.

I was disappointed when they said that they don’t offer personal hotpot for small tables. And nothing is free, from the utensils to the sauces to the snacks, everything is chargeable. I guessed since Houhai is a tourist attraction, this is common practice and the charges weren’t exorbitant.

Something was amiss when they offer two types of soup base, both the traditional clear water and Sichuan mala soup. No proper Beijing lamb hot pot will provide the Sichuan mala soup as it destroys the taste of their high quality lamb.

And then there’s the lamb. We ordered the platter of eight types of hand-cut lambs. The presentation was quite interesting, with egg bowls of lamb served on ice. That’s where it’s all wrong. None of the Beijing copper hot pot stores will serve their lambs on ice. It makes the lamb soggy and cramped up when blanched in the boiling water. Also, the skills of cutting the lamb was so bad, there were small pieces of tendons and bones in some of the cuts. The waitress was not able to differentiate the different cuts.

The beef sirloin looked like those from a supermarket, not much marbling. They disintegrated when you put them in the boiling water.

Even the 9 seconds beef tripes were quite chewy when blanched, although they were properly cleansed.

I couldn’t be bothered to comment on the rest of the items.

The hotpot failed its final test. The soup turned murky when blanching the meat. The mala soup base was flavourless. The meat was definitely top quality.

Be warned, there’s only one real South Gate hotpot in Beijing, and it can be recognised by its logo. They have only 9 shops in Beijing and one in Houhai (actually just another 300 m ahead of this one, just keep walking) – it’s not this one. Even if you used the dining app or GPS or search engines, hundreds of South Gate hotpot will appear. I now know better than to trust the app or search engines.

Palace Garden Hot Pot 京通南门涮肉
什刹海街道前海北沿15号（荷花市场内观景区）

Visited Apr 2026