Brought to you by the company behind Mongolia-based Little Sheep Hot Pot, this brand-new Asian eatery has taken over a vast space in Holborn’s The Office Group Building. The brand already has a number of restaurants spread across North America, Asia, Australia and Austria and this Happy Lamb Hot Pot site is its first UK venture.
For newbies to the Mongolian hot-pot concept, it’s a simple cooking method whereby diners choose from a range of meat, fish, vegetables and noodles to cook according to taste and timings in a shared pot of broth that bubbles away on the table.
The broth is made fresh each day from chicken and bone marrow and simmered for more than six hours, though that’s just the start of a process that also involves 36 Chinese herbs.
As at the other restaurants, Happy Lamb Hot Pot offers a choice of five soup bases – original marrow chicken broth, spicy, half original and half spicy, tomato or pickled cabbage – and a host of meat, fish and veg to dunk.
As the name suggests, lamb is the most authentically Mongolian protein to go for, from sliced shoulder to loin, or there’s beef shoulder, sirloin, rib-eye and short ribs. For fish eaters, there’s king prawn, mini octopus, sea bass, crab sticks and cuttlefish paste. There are also a couple of sauces (seafood and sesame) to daub onto your meat and fish, though as the restaurant’s motto is ‘good broth without dipping’, these aren’t necessary.
The inevitable splashes of broth mean that this isn’t the cleanest eating concept, so wipe-clean tables are a given, but otherwise the interiors are far more slickly designed than you might expect for a good-value chain perfectly located for overseas students at London University familiar with the brand back home as well as tourists looking for a reliable cheap eat after trawling through the British Museum.