Red Chili Sichuan Hot Pot

Very good Sichuan style hot pot. Service is not good but don’t expect much from Chinese restaurants. It’s the taste that counts and the soup base both chicken and spicy is really good!

I’ve never walked out on a restaurant before, but this was the closest I’ve ever been to doing so.
Service here is absolutely atrocious… like U.S. Government shutdown atrocious.
3 of us were walking down Glebe Point Road on Labour Day trying to figure out what we wanted to eat and this place was packed, we haven’t had hot pot in a while, and we were getting hungry. They told us the wait would be 20 minutes for a group hot pot vs. individual hot pots (this is a must because individual hot pots are wack) so we thought let’s get out of here cause we’re starving… then a table magically cleared so we waited 10 minutes for them to clean it up.
This place offers a hot pot buffet for $ 21.90 which is a bonus… though that doesn’t include the soup for the hot pot, which is $ 14 if you want chicken/​spicy soup. This spice is a type of spicy that is very intense, and can numb your tongue/​mouth but it doesn’t linger like the spice you’d expect from Southeast Asian food. You can order sauce individually or do the sauce buffet for another $ 4. All in all it’s roughly $ 30 per person for 3 without drinks.
Anyway the buffet items we ordered came out after 10 minutes, and we had to ask a few times for water. Cue the wait… we waited 20 minutes and the soup didn’t come out yet.
How hard is it to make soup? Granted they could possibly have been shortstaffed on Labour Day… but it’s soup for a hot pot place! You’d think they’d have huge pots of it in the kitchen. Just add water.
The place was so packed because everyone was waiting for their orders, not because it’s so good. After 20 minutes I said to my friends I’m walking out if it doesn’t come in 10 minutes and then the soup magically appeared at 9 minutes. But they didn’t give us any ladles to scoop the food out.
After a 40 minute wait after sitting down for food you’re supposed to cook yourself… we were finally able to cook.
The food’s actually decent, but not worth the wait for something so simple where you could get seated, run off to a restaurant next door, get your order and consume it before you even get served at the first restaurant.