Spice Spirit

Ok, this place gets 2 stars for the following reasons:
Food: we ordered the shrimp pot $ 14.99 and beef tripe as an add on for $ 3.99. At first, it tasted good then our tongue started to numb. Frankly, we thought they added a lot of pepper corn and chili. We only got mild spicy too. I guess sichuan style cooking isn’t our thing. Inside the pot, they added celery, bean sprouts, potatoes, wood ears, carrots, and etc. The veges made the dish light, but the potatoes were too filling for me. I was disappointed at the fact that they only gave us 5 shrimps in that big ol’ pot. The pic on the menu was veryyyy deceiving. Overall, it tasted ok, but it was rather too greasy and oily. We also ordered garlic spinach which was also oily and it was $ 7.99.
Service: the guy wasn’t friendly and he didnt smile. We were the only two in the whole place and then within 10 mins, a bunch of other ppl started coming in so he got super busy. He was the only waiter.
Ambiance: an asian restaurant, not much to say.
I am not sure if i’ll be coming back here.

I must admit, while I eat genuine sichuan food in Chinatown all the time and love spicy, I have never had dry pot before. I have had chicken and shrimp cooked dry in chilies at places like Chung King and assumed this would taste the same, as they look the same.
Well, it did not. First off, they have a large banner outside that says «BUY 1 GET 1 FREE» However, what it doesn’t say is LUNCH ONLY! For 10 bucks I think we got six shrimp in our shrimp dry pot. What I really didn’t like was the seasoning. The flavors were funky, and all of us were put off.
We started with the special wonton soup. One small bowl of soup with four wontons for 5 bucks. Let me just say now, ALL the portions were tiny. What three people shared could’ve just fed two people and maybe one hungry person. Back to the soup. It was found bland by my two companions. Considering it had my two least favorite ingredients in it — seaweed and cilantro — I found it actually kind of refreshing and light. The wontons were also good.
Also had the pork potstickers. They were okay, but one thing you notice in Chinatown is some joints have this weird off-​putting dark sour vinegar instead of white vinegar. The soy sauce here was kind of odd, too, so we nothing to dip them in that tasted good. Ruined the dish.
Kung Pao chicken was okay, but not the least bit spicy, like most places in Chinatown. Then again, this is a Sichuan place, so it should have been spicy. It was not, like all the regular Mandarin joints around. Also very small portion. Like a mini lunch portion.
Finally string beans. Best dish and decent, but one again not spicy and very small mini lunch size portion.
Bottom line, not going back. Too little food for too much money for Chinatown. Also, will try another dry pot place and figure out if I just hate dry pot or this place had bad dry hot pot. Either way, did not enjoy this meal at all.

Buy one pot for $ 10, get another one free? You also get one free honey green tea???
That was my level of amazement until the pots actually came. Our frog legs pot and pork intestine pot was mostly filled with potatoes, celery, bean sprouts and chili oil. It was so oily in fact, that it was getting to be kind of disgusting.
The flavor was actually pretty good if you take out the oiliness. The intestine was dry so I wouldn’t order it again. The frog legs were actually pretty big and the meat was really moist. I like that they didn’t cut the legs into tiny little sections like most other Chinese restaurants.
The service was pretty good although our waitress didn’t speak English very well. They also sell the Chinese yogurts, which really helps with the spiciness if you need a little help.

Where else can you get two spicy dry pot with $ 10? You ONLY get it HERE! Though they don’t have the best service considering there is only one waitress serving everyone at lunch time, their food was delicious! The right amount of spice and the portion was generous for its price! Already been there three times!

Pretty good. We didn’t wait too long for our lunch. I saw several ppl posted they waited around an hour. I was kinda worried. So I went to talk to the girl who was working here to ask her make our lunch faster. So after around 15 minutes we got our dishes. Taste good. I pretty like it. But the portion was small. Not as big as the photos look like. We had 5 ppl had lunch together. Ordered 5 dishes.

all of sudden it got cold in LA and was raining, so we initially wanted to go to the Work BBQ just down on Garvey, and then we passed the Spcie SPirit, and decided give it a try.
It was around noon on Wed, and we were pretty much the only ppl there. we tried the shrimp pot with add-​ons + water boiled beef. The water boiled beef is actually quite good, comparing to the ones I from all those sichuan restaurants in the SG valley. The pot itself is very good, very flavorful– i’d say it’s as good, if not better than the ones from the Work BBQ. The add-​ons are quite expensive actually, most of which are 3.99 each, comparing to 2.99 each over in the Work BBQ — and those adds up quite quickly.
The downside of the Spice spirit is that they don’t have much choice of appetizers. …

its very delicious.

Wow~it is really so surprise me;) inspire my taste
Really delicious if you like spice food!
^o^!
~

Heard about this place on the Chinese radio and decided to try it out. Food portion is small for a pot price at $ 9.99. Service is way too slow. After getting seated we waited for over 1.5 hrs for the food to come out and it never did, so we left.

This is a small restaurant that just recently opened across from the huge Younique Café. It’s basically in a small plaza that has an underground parking lot with limited spaces. Decided to drop by and try it out since dry pots seem to be the hype lately, but Spice Spirit simply did not live up to my expectations. They have this grand opening promotion right now where you buy one pot and get the second for free and so we ordered a total of two pots along with an appetizer. I was already a slight bit annoyed when we pretty much had to wait AN HOUR for this place, when there’s a perfectly good restaurant that’s right next door. Needless to say, I was hoping that this restaurant would be totally amazing since there was such a long wait. After standing around for the longest time, we were called in… only to wait some more IN THE RESTAURANT. Seriously arrived here at 12:30 and didn’t even leave until around 3PM because even waiting for our orders to come out took forever. The food finally came out after about 30 minutes +, and our medium spicy pot came out super salty while the other lamb pot barely had anything in it besides bean sprouts. The rice was all mushy like porridge, which only made eating it with the dry pot even more nasty. We weren’t offered water and I had to practically wave down the waiter to come get our order. I usually try to find at least one positive thing to say about a restaurant, but I did not enjoy my food or the service here so 2 stars is the most I’m willing to give. Perhaps it’s because they opened not too long ago that everything was so jumbled but my experience here was not good at all and in my opinion it definitely wasn’t worth the wait. Tasty Dining on Valley Blvd is still number one on the list for dry pots for me!

This place is model after Wok BBQ, which as they describe it is consider a dry pot dish. You order (you can also share) a pot of selected meat with some veggies and then add on to it. Flavor was pretty good. Size is slightly smaller than Wok BBQ but price was slightly lowerr as well. We got the chicken wing and added the enoki mushroom, mung bean noddles, and pig blood. The mild was very mild and not at all spicy to our taste. The fried potato sticks were good as it absorbed the flavor well. We also order the chili intestine dish. It was very mild as well. Flavor was ok too. Better deal at Wok BBQ but flavor is slightly better here.

love it! hot!

My addiction started insidiously enough.
In 2008, I decided to try «Water Boiled Beef», a harmlessly named dish that my friend had recommended from a popular Sichuan restaurant. «Water-​boiled» was a misnomer because the beef was actually submerged in red chili oil. It was exceedingly salty and caused a strange numbing pain in my mouth. Days later, I felt an unexplained craving for the same WBB dish and decided to give it a second try. Again, yucky oiliness, too much saltiness, numbing pain — I remember saying I wasn’t gonna go back. But, after a month, the waiters all knew my name.
I did some online research and diagnosed myself with Sichuan peppercorn addiction. I learned that WBB is packed with these Sichuan peppercorns, which are known to trigger a rush of endorphins in your brain. You know what else creates a surge of endorphins? Cocaine. Just like cocaine, too much oil-​drenched WBB will eventually kill you.
For the past few years, I’ve zombied around the 626 eating from one Sichuan joint to another. When Spicy Spirit grand opened yesterday, I was already waiting at the door. The place was completely empty. I tried to act like a normal customer, but ended up asking the waitress a lot of questions: Which Chinese city is your chef from? Are you more Sichuan or Hunan? Does your WBB cause a lot of numbness? I had inadvertently made the nervous waitress even more uncomfortable on her first day of work.
The waitress brought out a cold dish sampler (not very good), a casserole (good), and most importantly, my WBB (called «Beef Cooked with Hot Chili Pepper» on their menu). She went back to the register and, having nothing else to do, watched her first and only customer eat. It didn’t bother me. The flavor of the WBB was just right: garlicky with a slight woody fragrance. The boiled beef was so ridiculously tender I bobbed my head and smiled. Two minutes after my first bite, that’s when it dropped. My mouth began to numb, my eyes rolled back, I could hear Major Lazer, and the waitress began to get really creeped out.
I know some hardcore peppercorn junkies may be skeptical because «Spice Spirit» is actually a chain of restaurants in China that was founded in Beijing, where they know little about spicy food. However, Spice Spirit’s WBB, at least the one I tried here in Monterey Park, is genuine unadulterated Sichuan.
By the way, the restaurant gave me a customer loyalty card as I left. Buy 10 casseroles and it’s $ 9.99 off the next tab. Gripped by uneasiness, the waitress forgot to stamp my card.