Hotpot Story Review

Hotpot Story is a Vietnamese Chain restaurant member of the Redsun-ITI Group that owns tons of restaurant chains such as KING BBQ Buffet, BukBuk or Thai Express. It’s fair to say that they are well implanted in Vietnam especially in malls and they know what they are doing.

The concept of Hotpot Story is very simple, like its name suggest it’s all about Hotpot, the favorite dish of Vietnamese for social eating.

Hotpot Story illustration by Halo Travel

The location

For our review we tried the restaurant located in Aeon Mall Long Bien. Located in the 3rd floor near the food court, the restaurant benefit a strategic position since located in the corner, two sides of the restaurant can be seen from outside.

The restaurant is medium sized, I would say. The sitting configuration is slightly tight in my opinion especially with a kid onboard.

The decoration is nothing too fancy, strictly what is needed. I feel like this restaurant proposition is good value for money relatively to the location (Aeon Mall).

The franchise count a lot of different location across Hanoi and Vietnam.

The menu

This restaurant have multiples offering in their menus but most people will come for the all you can eat buffet for over 320,000 vnd which is still a lot for regular folks in here. This doesn’t account for drinks.

Desserts, appetizers, specialties and sauce are disposed in the small self serving buffet section

There’s nothing very special about their menu except that you can choose a variety of different soup stock. For example you can have 3 flavors at the same time in one table, like Tom Yum, Mushrooms and 5 spices. These day most Hotpot location with have these options.

The served buffet all you can eat have two options. One including all type of food, like sea food and other specialties, while the cheapest option only have the most popular meats.

The buffet was honestly very limited this same day. So much so that we could try most of it. Fortunately the French Fries and Stewed Beef were both excellent.

The quality

This day the waiters forgot to serve us the famous Beef Volcano

The quality of the food, like the location, the staff and concept is decent. Nothing exceptional or out of the ordinary. I would say it’s less impressive than places like GOGI or Sumo BBQ but the price is not as expensive as well, so all in all in can be an option.

One thing to note is that the induction oven was all written in Chinese and it only had options between extreme boiling and bearly boiling, which made it very inconvenient.

Verdict

6.5 out of 10

Hotpot Story is the kind of joint you go to if you are looking to eat a regular hotpot with friends or family, knowing that the food, the service is nothing out of the ordinary but with a decent price.

I personally would rather spend the extra money to try a higher end hotpot or even go within the city to get the real deals.

Trying Hotpot Story

Eating hot pot is always an enjoyable experience when shared, so it’s a shame that the tables and seats are a bit too tight to be comfortable or to accept the different dishes. The induction oven remote was also very tricky compared to other places I’ve been.

All of these made for a less enjoyable experience in my opinion.