For the uninitiated, Little Sheep is a chain of Mongolian Hot Pot restaurants with the central premise that you chose a soup base, which bubbles away violently like a witch’s cauldron on a hot plate at your table, and you order a bunch of raw ingredients to cook (yourself) in the soup. For my most recent visit, I was fortunate enough to be in the company of Cantonese speaking friends, so we went for the ‘all you can eat’ buffet (menu only in Chinese at the TST branch) – subject to a two hour maximum sitting. It worked out at a little over HK$200 per head including a few beers each (750ml Asahi for HK$22), which is decent value, in my view. Top tip: your clothes tend to absorb the cooking smells so don’t get too dressed up.
For the soup base the options are spicy, not spicy, or a bowl split down the middle with half spicy and half not. We opted for the half and half. The soup uses a meat broth (presumably mutton) and is loaded with “dozens of Chinese medical restorative materials”. I identified ginger, whole nutmegs, garlic cloves, and maybe coriander seeds, but there’s a myriad of other ingredients. The spicy side is laden with dried chillies and chilli oil, but otherwise appears broadly the same. Top tip 2: the spicy side is pretty spicy! I have a reasonably high tolerance for chilli but when I (probably rather foolishly) drank some of the ‘hot’ broth, it really took my breath away.
There’s not too much to be said about the raw ingredients apart from that they appear to be decent quality. Paper thin slices of beef and mutton dipped in the soup take seconds to cook and are delicious. Lobster balls are sweet and pleasing. Mushrooms are great because they soak up plenty of the delicious broth. Various Asian greens – pak choy, buk choy etc, are as you would expect. For me, the most enjoyable aspect of this kind of restaurant is the ‘interactiveness’ of it. There’s something deeply satisfying about having several plates of raw food that you cook together as a group. And fishing around the murky bowl for that illusive mushroom that you’ve seen floating to the surface every now and then, or that lost fish ball that you know is hiding somewhere, is all part of the charm.
It is a shame that there’s no English menu for the two-hour buffet. For those brave enough to go for it regardless and blindly select dishes from the Chinese menu, be aware that you may find yourself with dishes that will challenge you. Duck’s intestines taste slightly gamey but with the texture of squid – not wholly unpleasant but a little unusual. Bitter melon is exceptionally bitter – not among my favourite vegetables. And I can only describe cubed pig’s blood as savoury metallic panna cotta!
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