Tucked away at the back of a shopping centre in Sydney’s Chinatown is JKG Shangcheng Hotpot King. It is a relatively budget hotpot restaurant, with a wide selection of meats and seafoods but a lower emphasis on cleanliness and service.
Ordering is via a tablet-based system. Make sure to scroll down the page to view all offerings, as we were initially very confused as to why our options were so extremely limited.
Sauce attracts an extra charge, however as I’m not a big fan of sauce we were able to convince them to let us only pay for one serving. The sauce station was very dodgy and had a bug-zapper lamp next to it. I don’t know if this was the best decision, as while it would be good at killing bugs it was probably also part of why there were so many flying bugs near the sauce station.
The wontons in chili soup were yum. The filling was evidently housemade, which is preferable to store-bought.
For our soup bases we got mushroom and chicken broths. The mushroom broth was very shroomy with many assorted shrooms – perhaps superfluous as we also ordered a number of shrooms to cook ourselves. The chicken broth we felt was flavourless apart from being salty.
The serving sizes for fresh vegetables, mixed mushrooms, and mixed tofu were quite large, and good value for the price. Having full sized servings of all three was a bit too much for us as a couple however , and we wish that they would do half sized servings for half the price. Nonetheless, it would be good for a party of three or four.
A metre of beef was too much for us. The beef was a bit too fatty.
No complaints about the chicken.
Overall my partner and I spent around $120 on our meal including a beer. This is around the same price that we paid at YX Mini Hot Pot, however we got much more food (of somewhat lesser quality) for the money. I would recommend JKG Shangcheng Hotpot King to a more price-conscious market, for example students, who at the same time do not expect much service (it took a very long time and multiple visits for our hot pot soup to be topped up).
JKG Shancheng Hotpot King (山城火锅王)
Shop 8A/363 Sussex St, Haymarket NSW 2000
(02) 9267 6366