Nine Spices Hotpot in Orlando, FL

I visited Nine Spices Hotpot on Kirkman Drive in Orlando. I've been to other hotpot places a few times before, but this one was even more fun because Nine Spices features conveyor belts! At dinner there were a few options including all you can eat from the conveyors for about $24. Other menu options included soups with pre-selected ingredients. I decided on the all you can eat. When you enter the restaurant, take note of the helpful sign telling you the cooking times.

There was a choice of several broths. I tried their Original broth. It was a bit bland on its own, but they had a sauce bar which flavored the broth nicely.

Once the broth quickly came to a boil on the induction stove built into the table, it was time to start cooking food. The conveyors were endlessly being refilled with various ingredients. I started with several items and started cooking!

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Dumplings, noodles, lamb, tofu, taro, and greens went into the pot first.

After a few minutes the contents of the pot were scooped out of the broth, eaten, and the whole process repeated!

I had fun eating at Nine Spices. Cooking soup with lots of ingredients chosen from conveyor belts makes for an interesting meal!

NY Asian Soups: Global Kitchen and Minnis Shabu Shabu

In a continuation of the last few posts on this blog where New York foods were discussed, this post is about Asian foods that consisted of soup.

We'll start at a place called Global Kitchen. This restaurant was located in the Theater District and was set up food court style. The place reminded me a bit of the nearby Oliviero Cafe which I had eaten at during a previous trip to New York. There was a station focusing on sandwiches. Another focused on salads. There was an Italian/pizza section, then there was where I ordered. I went for the Japanese/Sushi counter.

I had a bowl of their shrimp tempura udon soup. The large styrofoam bowl was filled with a tasty broth and lots of thick udon noodles. After the broth and noodles filled the bowl, the soup was topped with various vegetables, tofu, and two large shrimp fried in tempura batter.

This was a tasty bowl of soup overall. I wasn't exactly expecting much for a place which was essentially a food court, but this was a very nice bowl of udon that rivaled what I've had at fancy Japanese restaurants!



The second soupy food adventure happened at Minnis Shabu Shabu. Minnis was a Taiwanese style hotpot style restaurant located in Flushing Chinatown. Shabu Shabu is a style of eating where you cook your own meats in pots of boiling broth. I've been to restaurants where you cook your own foods and I always find them a bit intimidating. That makes food adventures much more fun!

Everyone in Minnis was seated at large communal tables. All the seats had a bowl of hot broth in front of them to cook your food.

Everyone then received a large tray of various non-meat foods items to cook. These included cabbage, corn, onions, multiple types of mushrooms, two different dumplings, noodles, egg, tofu, and more.

I ordered the lamb and pork combination for my meat. Thinly slice meat was soon delivered to the table and cooking began.

Cooking the meat was the intimidating part for me, mostly because I rarely cook meat by boiling it. I didn't want to undercook the pork, but it cooked extremely fast since it was sliced so thinly. Some of the vegetables took longer to cook, such as the corn or large pieces of cabbage.

There was a large sauce/condiment bar to add some extra flavor to the food. They seemed to like MSG at Minnis.

I also had a shaved ice here for dessert. This large bowl was filled with finely shaved ice topped with sweetened condensed milk, pineapple, and something called grass jelly. Shaved ice like this is way better than a snow cone!

Minnis Shabu Shabu was a very fun eating experience. Having a pot of boiling broth and a huge pile of raw foods in front of you, then having to figure out how to cook everything definitely makes things more interesting than just having cooked food delivered to your table.