Highly Rated Dry Pot near Nanjing Fuxing

PANDA-MAMA is a dry pot restaurant near Nanjing Fuxing MRT Station with a whopping 4.9 review score on Google and a 5 on Facebook. Now, before you get too excited, do note that this newly-reopened restaurant has only garnered a little over 50 reviews so far (and far fewer on Facebook), but it’s still a good indication of what to expect from the food.

If you’re sitting there wondering what the heck a dry pot is, don’t worry — you are not alone. Basically, it is almost the same thing as hot pot, made with largely the same ingredients and spices, but without the broth. Instead of ordering a bunch of raw ingredients to add to the dish yourself, you will order a bunch of raw ingredients that the chefs will cook in a massive pot for you, taking away the DIY component completely. Like hot pot, you choose the flavour of your base/seasonings before you start, and these spices will just be mixed up with your ingredients, completely undiluted by any liquid. Now, for some people, removing the DIY aspect of hot pot removes all of the fun of making the food yourself. For others, it removes the mild anxiety of having to keep track of what you put in and when. Despite the similarities between the two dishes, you are not guaranteed to like or dislike one based on how you feel about the other.

PANDA-MAMA’s menu is all in Chinese, so you may need to whip out Pleco, Google Translate, or your camera to consult a Chinese-speaking friend. You could also just take a complete gamble if you are an adventurous eater — why not, right? First, choose your flavouring ($30): options are hot pot spice, curry, or soy sauce. For the hot pot spice, you can choose mild, medium, or spicy.  Then, go down the list of ingredients and tick off as many as you like. On average, each ingredient is around $40. For two people, the recommended number is around eight, but you can go as high or as low as you like. There is no minimum order.

All orders come with a complimentary plate of pickled red cabbage. Don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it: it’s absolutely delicious.

As soon as our dry pot came, we realized we probably should have stuck to the recommended eight ingredients since there was a huge amount of food and we weren’t quite hungry enough for it. We ordered a hodge-podge of different ingredients like chicken, beef, fried youtiao, broccoli, quail’s eggs, mushrooms, and onions. We chose the hot pot spice in medium but didn’t feel like it was very spicy, so requested some chilli oil to vamp it up. There was a huge amount of food and it took us a long time to get through it, but it was absolutely delicious. It wasn’t as fun to eat as hot pot, but we also felt that the flavours came out a little more.

To bulk up our order, we got spicy noodles ($45) and a bowl of white rice ($10). The spicy noodles were tasty and surprisingly spicy — way spicier than the dry pot had been. In hindsight, we probably didn’t need the rice since the dry pot was so filling, but the spicy noodles were a nice addition.

We also grabbed a big bottle of Singha beer ($100) and an interesting milky sweet potato drink that didn’t exactly blow us away, but was pleasant enough and did a good job at staving away some of the more intense spice. All in all, for the dry pot, drinks, rice, and noodles, we paid $435, a completely reasonable price that could have been much lower if we had been more judicious about what we ordered. We really enjoyed everything we ate, even if we went a little overboard with the ingredients — those Google reviews weren’t lying!

What’s the vibe?

Small, relaxed, and clean restaurant specializing in dry pot. Service was prompt and pleasant. Customers are mostly Taiwanese.

Worth it?

Sure! We can’t say whether or not you will like dry pot itself, but the quality of food was great, and the prices were completely reasonable. We loved that there was no minimum spend and you could completely customize your order.

Would you go back?

Perhaps. While the food was good and plentiful, eating hot pot is definitely a more fun experience all-round. We’d go back to take friends, but are less likely to return if we were by ourselves.

Visited: December 2018

Panda Mama

Chinese Name: PANDA-MAMA 麻辣干鍋

Hours: 11:30am - 2:30pm, 5:30pm - 10:30pm

Phone: 02 2777 4949

English Address: No. 171-4, Section 2, Chang'an East Road, Zhongshan District, Taipei

Chinese Address: 台北市中山區長安東路二段171-4號