Haidilao Hotpot, Level 1, The Glen Shopping Centre, 235 Springvale Road, Glen Waverley. Phone: 8863 0031

Hi! This isn’t your usually Kenny here … it’s Veronica.

Over the weekend, I dragged Bennie on a 35-minute train to Glen Waverley to check out a very cool hotpot place.

Haidilao is a chain coming from China. It’s currently all over Thailand, Vietnam, Boxhill and very soon coming to our Melbourne City.

I’ve recently been drowning with social media posts about this place – and how if you say certain things you get a gift.

For example, “Rabbits are so cute, how could you eat them?” will get you either an inflatable toy or rabbit shaped pudding.

When I asked our waiter about this, she laughed and said it was for kids only.

That didn’t stop her from getting me a dinosaur balloon and explaining that they do free manicures and hand massages between 9am-5pm on week days.

We had a reservation for 7.30pm and lucky we did as it was PACKED right outside the restaurant.

It’s a hugely popular place.

The customer service at Haidilao was beyond amazing. They provide everything.

If you take a sip of water, it’ll be refilled ASAP. There are snacks on the table on arrival, as well as wipes for your hands, hair ties, an apron to keep yourself nice and clean and even a wireless phone charger on the table.

On top of the incredible customer service, most of the food was delicious.

We ordered four soup bases ($9.90 each) – laksa, bone, mushroom and three-delicacy.

Bennie and I agreed the laksa was definitely lacking in flavour and the bone soup was just average.

However, the mushroom soup was SO jam-packed full of flavour and the three-delicacy soup was our favourite.

After the first 10 minutes we started to neglect the laksa and bone soup, slightly regretting getting them in the first place.

But the three-delicacy and mushroom soups truly made up for the disappointment – even without the tender meat, I was happy to drink the soup itself as dinner.

We ordered Haidilao style beef and lamb ($15 each), which had a reccommended cooking time of five minutes and turned out so tender.

Which was somewhat surprising for a small piece of boiled meat.

Along with the Haidilao-styled meat, we had some thinly sliced ox tongue and lamb shoulder (around $14 each).

Both were amazing – the meat was high quality and cooked in about five seconds.

To accompany the meat we ordered a few vegetables, potato slices, enoki mushrooms and tofu skin.

I don’t really have much to say about the vegetables – nothing wrong with them, nothing special about them. Just very average vegetables.

Our favourite part was the dancing noodles – you get a whole performance for just $3.90!

At this point in the meal, Bennie and I were ruined – we had overeaten and forgotten we had even ordered the dancing noodles.

I reckon it was still worth seeing – no places I’m aware of offer this kind of entertainment with your food!

Overall, Haidilao was definitely an experience, but one with a pretty high price tag.

Our bill was about $170 for both Bennie and I, on top of about two hours of travel for myself and 40 minutes from Bennie.

I’d say it was worth it just once.

Maybe Bennie would agree.

I’m not sure we’ll be back anytime soon or even check out their CBD store when it opens.

For that sort of price tag, it will have to to be for a special event!