102 Castro St
Mountain View, CA 94041
Rating:
Located on busy Castro Street in Mountain View, Little Sheep Hot Pot opened its newest location in a fairly small space. As we entered, we noticed quite a few people waiting inside and outside for a table. After providing my name to the hostess, we were given a wait time of an hour. The hostess also provided us with a paper check-off menu and a pen. We reviewed and selected all of our food options during our wait time. Luckily, we were called in early for our table in around 30 minutes as long as we were OK with sitting at a temporary 2-person table instead of a booth. Since we did not want to wait, we took the hostess up on the offer.
Today, we decided to order the half & half soup base which came with their house original and house spicy soup in a split pot. For the other items, we ordered the New Zealand spring lamb, American-style Kobe beef, hand sliced supreme fatty beef, American Kurobuta pork, house made beef meat ball, spinach, broccoli, and U-don noodle. The house soup on its own is extremely salty. Even though the instructions on the place mat suggest drinking some of the soup, I cannot suggest you do so because it was so salty. The house spicy soup had way too many chopped up peppers in it. Every time you scoop something, from the spicy side, you always come up with peppers. The broth does add quite a bit of spice to whatever you submerge in it though. We had two side sauces: satay and house special chili sauce, but I found the satay to be overly grainy with no flavor and the house special chili sauce very spicy.
The Kurobuta pork arrived first on a plate rolled up very nice. After cooking the pork, there was not much flavor from the meat itself because you can only taste the soup. The pork was not very tender at all. The American-style Kobe beef came with very few slices, but was very tender and fresh after cooking. The fatty beef was not that fatty at all and just came in a fresh pile. This beef was also quite tender and fresh. The meat balls took a while to cook due to its density, but it had no flavor and did not taste fresh. The spinach and broccoli tasted delicious when cooked in the house soup. The server had actually forgotten the lamb, so that was brought after the rest of the meat. The lamb looked very interesting on the plate and cooked fairly quickly in the broth. The meat tasted very gamey and not very tender.
Overall, Little Sheep Hot Pot offers up a fairly diverse option for hot-pot if you are looking for different types of meat and vegetables. Unfortunately, once you start checking off what you want to eat, your bill total quickly rises. Although we may have over-ordered by one meat plate, the price for the two of us is way overpriced. We had a much better experience and much better tasting food when we ate Japanese hot-pot at Tokyo Shabu Shabu in Pasadena. With its long wait times and lack of room to eat, I do not find myself wanting to come back to any Little Sheep Hot Pot location. If you really want to eat hot-pot with a very spicy soup, then you can come here, but if you want to enjoy delicious hot-pot, just stick with Japanese hot-pot.
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