409 Mains Road, Sunnybank
It's winter in Brisbane; that time of the year when for a couple of weeks we get hit with the kind of weather other countries would find mild and fine, but as a QLDer, sends me frozen to the core. The only cure for these painfully chilly nights is hot pot.
I love hot pot and I enjoy all versions, be it Chinese-style sliced lamb hot pot, Korean-style spicy seafood or Japanese shabu shabu. If it's bubbling and interactive, I'm a fan. We do Chinese hot pot at home a fair bit but one night, the mood struck me suddenly and I didn't have any of the necessary ingredients. Going out was the only solution.
If I'm to be totally honest (which I always am) the thing that intrigued me most about this restaurant is its name. I'm a sucker for lame puns! I didn't even know what they served until I was Googling hot pot restaurants around Brisbane and 'Bestaurant' came up as one of the options. Since they're the "best" I definitely had to give it a go :).
The restaurant was more or less what I expected. The staff had limited English and communication skills and handed us menus without any explanation. I was confused about what the system was but one sheet had prices on it and the other just had a total so I assume there's an all you can eat option and maybe an a la carte option?!
I asked a waitress which menu we were supposed to circle items on and just went with the one that she suggested, which was the AYCE option. At least that keeps the ordering process more straight forward.
We selected some sliced lamb and beef plus various veggies and other additions. The hot pot comes out as individual pots so we chose a soup base each. Mine was original and Marc selected spicy.
There is a sauce-mixing station towards the back corner of the restaurant with all your familiar Asian condiments, spices and fresh herbs to garnish.
I won't elaborate too much on the actual hotpotting because that just involves dipping ingredients in and eating. Staff did come around to top up our soup periodically. I liked that the heat element was easy to control but my foot kept getting tangled up in electric cable... not sure about the health and safety of that set up.
In short this was the kind of hot pot meal we could have easily prepared ourselves if we had the foresight to pre-purchase ingredients. Since I hadn't done that, The Bestaurant served as an adequate means of fixing my hot pot craving.
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