Food: Hai Di Lao

Food: Hai Di Lao

So finally, after waiting for almost a whole year, I finally had a chance to eat at the famed Hai Di Lao. For those who don't know, Hai Di Lao is considered as a ala carte steamboat style of food whereby you will need to pay for the soup you choose, and every dish you order you will pay for the specific dish. This is in contrast to other steamboat buffets a lot which can be found in Chinatown and quite a fair few from all around such as Coca steamboat and Sukiya. These other buffets are free flow and you might need to go ahead and grab or order the food but you can eat and eat. However, Hai Di Lao is an ala carte but all in all, do you need to hesitate when deciding what to order? Would you end up paying more? Read on to find out more.

Food 4.5/5

You get to choose two soups, for this, Mala and Tomato

There are quite a variety of soups presented including the standard chicken stock soup. I think there should be four or five different soups in total. For us though, we got ourselves the Mala which is the spicy type of soup, and a tomato soup for those who did not want to eat spicy. Nonetheless, my mates with me tried the Mala and it was not TOO hot even for them. However, when we ordered the soup, there was the option presented to us to add or reduce the spiciness of the Mala soup. It's this type of variety that made the entire meal a bit more pleasant, and I believe this was the concept that the management of Hai Di Lao wanted to focus on and can be seen in many aspects of the management of the eating experience.

The soup overall, was tasty. Yep, I would dare say that amongst all the soup I have tasted, this Mala is one of the more unique, and even the best, so much that even Mala lovers could give it a try and it might ignite their passion for Mala.

One point to note however, is that when you ask for refill of the soup, I noticed that the soup was the normal chicken stock at least for my Mala. Hence after refilling twice, it started not being that spicy anymore. Not sure if this is the standard but it could have been expressed to us.

Here comes the first course of meat! Note, these were all HALF portions

 For a start, we were allowed to order half portions of almost all the dishes on the Ipad provided. What this means is that, you can go for variety and you do not have to force yourself to stuff down too much of the food, making you full and unable to try other dishes. You can also decide from the first round which meats you find most delicious and then order it subsequently. It's a very smart move and like i said, this is a variety in the ordering style which adds to the experience.

Taste wise, you can see that the meats are very thinly cut, and thus very easy to cook and consume. All the meats we chose were tasty, not too fat. For beef alone, they had like 4 different grades or types of beef for people with different tastes and budgets, and this makes good business sense.

Tofu, mushroom and a bunch of 4 different pastes, vermicelli

 As you can see from the photo above, you can ask for an assortment of mushrooms, nothing new many places have this. but look further above and see the red white and white green oval dishes. This was one of the paste dish ranging from prawn, to meat to spinach prawn and one more that i cannot remember cause the waitress said it in chinese. Nonetheless, they allow you to order small bits and really just try everything.

Sauces to tantalize your taste buds

 And look at the variety of sauces. They had a sauce rack with like over 10 different kind of sauces and that rack also had some small dishes like peanuts and pickles. But wait! What if you are not the sauce loving person? Well Hai Di Lao has gotten this covered. For HDL, their sauce and small dish bar is not included, but is free flow for a price of 4 dollars. What this means is that for those who don't need sauces, they actually don't charge you for it like what other companies do in their buffet prices. Hence overall you might not spend too much. You will see this further in the pricing section.

Taste wise, with so many different kind of sauces (in fact this is the biggest array I have seen so far), you SHOULD be able to find one to your liking. In korean BBQ buffet you always only have maybe chilli soy sauce and the korean chilli which honestly I don't really fancy, but here, you can get the spicy chilli paste, but if you like still must have korean chilli they also have that too. That's the variety they give. Other sauces include chilli oil, mushroom paste (chinese version), sesame and more.

Atmosphere 4.5/5

This is the style for 4 people hotpot, come prepared with charger, you might spend long here

If you haven't noticed, I have given the atmosphere 4.5 out of 5. Is that justifiable, well, let me tell you why.

Look at the size of the table. Its big and that means you don't have to try to squeeze all your stuff on the table. Of course our table was for 4 and maybe 6 people may be given this table too but it is quite large in general already. For 8 tables and above there are even bigger and more fun round tables. With a huge table like this, there was also no worries about the steam and smoke flying into your eyes. In fact, none of us left the place smelling like Mala. The whole place is well ventilated.

When the guy brings in the soup, he even asks you which way you want to orientate the soup. So if you are the only guy eating using one of the soup, you can arrange it so that its convenient for all. 

All tables are also looked after by a specific waitress. For us, our young waitress only had to look after 4 tables. There is no need to reach out and try to grab the attention of the waitress and spend quite a bit of time looking like a fool. Nope, our waitress was right there for us and she even offered to help us order when the chinese words and the navigation of the Ipad became a chore.

The waitress can even help you scoop the soup and filter it for you

The waitress can go all the way to the extent of helping you scoop your soup and she even helped us put in the mushrooms and tofu when we started.

Lazy to hold the soup? Make use of the ladle holder

Other good things that they did, they offered to give us plastic bags to cover our hand phones to protect from the splatter.

The overall structure and layout of the place was also very very good. No one was too close to anyone and there was much space to move around. They didn't squeeze all the sauce and small snack bar at a corner and make everyone go long distance for it. Instead they provided no less then 3 corners for all their customers at the sacrifice of their number of tables that they could lay out.

Price 3.5/5

As you can see from the picture above, the price for 4 people would total to about 130.65 which is about 30++ per pax. Granted not all of us took the sauce, we still ordered pretty much to our fill and it was filling. Note that I ate with 3 ladies so maybe their amount they ate was slightly lesser but in all honesty i doubt that.

On a side note however, I made another visit to the place and this time two of us actually ate a sum of 90++ dollars which is about 40+ per pax. So this would be the probable range that you spent but the 2nd time we ate, we slightly over ate.

Nonetheless, they actually allowed you to order HALF portions so that you can actually try and sample the food first before deciding on what u want to order more of which will help keep the cost reasonable.

It's not entirely cheap but you will feel that overall, you got your money's worth (unless you really wasted a lot of time waiting)

Accessibility 4/5

Hai Di Lao is actually famous for it's long queues if you ask people who have been there before. If you plan to go there for dinner, i would recommend you actually go down at about 4.30 or even 4 to get a number first so that by the time you reach your number, it would be about 6.

In fact, when we were done eating at about 10 plus, we still saw people queuing outside. Be prepared for 2 to 3 hours queue at the peak weekend hours. Also note that the staff will tell you that it is a 2 hours wait but in the end you wait for about 3 hours instead which was what happened to us.

However, if you are up to it and just want to try the food, you can come down early at about 11.30 and treat it as lunch instead. The 2nd time I went around that time, there was no queue and we could go there to eat.

On the other hand, the reality is, despite the long queue, HDL actually managed to score some points back in accessibility. This is because unlike other places where they want you to stand in queue, this place allows you to just take a number and come back a few hours later. Even if you came back too early, they actually served some drinks and fruits AT NO CHARGE. In fact you can even go get a manicure done over there, just walk in and get a time slot for it to be done and this is also free. All these facilities and actions make this restaurant well above the rest in service and making the wait less miserable.

The queues are long because this place also DOES NOT restrict your eating time unlike buffets. So you can go in and take as long as you want and it adds to the overall comfort of the place.

One more thing is that phone bookings are possible, but only if you book weeks in advance. Their booking seats are very limited such as half of their premise at a time and actually I would say that this is the better arrangement because you can go and eat when you feel like it and the waiting times for the waiting queue will not be atrociously long as there are more tables allocated to walk in.

It is also just above somerset MRT which means it is easy to get there and easy to get back from there which is a big plus.

All in all, besides the long long long wait, HDL has done a lot to make the wait less miserable and in all honesty and realism, it is difficult to improve further given what that they want to focus on a good eating experience and good service instead of just merely focusing on profit.

Overall

Food: 4.5 (Food and soup tastes good, has a huge variety and is highly customizable)
Atmosphere: 4.5 (Very customer service orientated right from the queuing stage all the way to the end)
Price: 3.5 (It's not cheap, but its not expensive. All in all, you feel that the price is deserved)
Accessibility: 4 (Easy to get to, and if you in a rush, go there very early first. Even if you queue, you are not stuck there and can do other things)

Overall: 4.125 (This is a kind of place that I can safely say, you should go and eat there at least once in your life. In fact, if you have friends coming from overseas, get them to visit cause they are not just selling the food, but also the entire experience. Tips to make the wait easier, bring card games to play. You can literally sit there for hours and if you have cards, the wait can be longer. Didn't see anyone doing this though so don't go gambling there. Just make proper planning and I think your visit to HDL won't be anything regrettable.)

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