Restaurant review: Xiao Wei Yang Hotpot, Dubai
Restaurant review: Xiao Wei Yang Hotpot, Dubai by Time Out Dubai Staff on Thursday, 05 July 2007
Is everything ok?' asked a friendly waitress with a slight air of concern. I glanced up, nodded enthusiastically and chomped on another testicle. Next, I swished a bit of black fungus around before bundling it in my mouth with some rubber muscles.
Eating in Deira's Xiao Wei Yang Hotpot restaurant can make you do the strangest things. For example, while I was removing a couple of grilled lamb's gonads from a wooden skewer, my friend was stabbing his Mandarin fish balls with a chopstick like an ever-so-peckish serial killer. It's that kind of place.
For those unsure of the concept behind the hotpot, it has nothing to do with flat-capped English northerners muttering ‘By 'eck, our Maureen' in between mouthfuls of meat and potato stew on a drizzly Lancashire eve. No. Instead, a large bowl of stock - in this case a yin-yang combo of milky-coloured, herby chicken broth and an oily red pool of mouth-numbing chilli and garlic-infused spice - is placed on a hotplate in the centre of the table, and left to boil and bubble. Then, ingredients are ordered individually from a menu that reads like a greengrocer's inventory, and tossed into the roiling liquids until ready to eat. It's very simple, riotously informal and more fun than a Jacuzzi full of jelly.
Into our twin hotpot went crispy shards of fresh Chinese cabbage that were engulfed in hot soup before emerging gently softened and drenched in spice. There were more leaves in the form of kankong, a semi-aquatic tropical plant similar to spinach.
The greens were followed by something black - a dark jelly fungus shaped like the human ear - together with huge, exquisitely velvety shiitake mushrooms. The ‘unique lamb slices' were painfully thin shavings of fresh flesh that puckered into rosettes of browned meat in seconds. When they were fished out of one side of the hotpot, chunks of raw hammour were plunged into the other, returning to our bowls in curled, tender flakes.
It soon became apparent that there are two ways you can eat from the pot. Grazers can pick whatever their slippery chopsticks can clasp directly from the steaming concoction and slap it in the peanut, soy, coriander and chilli dipping sauce. Alternatively, the slurping contingent can grab a ladle and spoon great puddles of goodie-strewn stock straight into their bowls and enjoy it as a soup. This was where the noodles were best employed - the long flour-dusted strands of freshly stretched dough snaked around the other ingredients during cooking to reappear in a soft, tangled mass. And the Mandarin fish balls were buoyant with a splash of spicy stock.
As if all that wasn't enough, we decided to think outside the pot and indulge in some grilled offerings.
When the soft and fluffy lamb testes arrived at the table, I had visions of a sorry-looking sheep forlornly traipsing a hillside somewhere with a falsetto bleat. But when the rest of the meat appeared, I was reminded that very little goes to waste in traditional Chinese cuisine. The barbecued lamb chops were richly seasoned and uproariously fatty, and the lamb rubber muscles - nothing more than tendons on skewers - were as chewy and resilient as old tennis racket strings. But we didn't care. And neither did the many Chinese diners in this fun, friendly and sometimes frenetic hotpot restaurant - they were having a ball too.
