Dainty Sichuan

August 30, 2013

We've had some spicy good times at South Yarra's Dainty Sichuan, so were excited to read Simple Eater's review of the new Box Hill version, which focuses on the Sichuan hotpot experience. We were even more excited when Steph, The Simple Eater and Hayley invited us to join them on a jaunt out to sample it for ourselves.

Steph is a passionate advocate of the hotpot, so we let her give us the run-down on the whole process. It's pretty simple: you just pick your preferred soup base (vegos can pick from mushroom, spicy or super spicy - or not, check out the new comment from Ruby) and then go crazy with things to cook in it. You can even get a split soup base - I went for a combo of mushroom and spicy, because I figured you can't really go to a Sichuan place without getting stuck into some chilli.

Turns out this was kind of a mistake - the chilli base is pretty potent and tended to overpower a lot of the fillings. And you don't need to focus your chilli energy on the pot, because Dainty Sichuan has a condiment station!

Look at all those condiments! There's about three different kinds of chilli sauces, a big pot of sesame oil, shallots, garlic, soy, vinegar and on and on and on. I made up a quite glorious little bowl of vinegar and Sichuan pepper, which would have served all my spice needs. So, a quick tip: get the mushroom stock and then go crazy with the chilli-based condiments - it gives you a bit more control. Luckily, there are a range of cooling drinks - Cindy and I both went for a lychee ice ($4.50).

Sweet and icy - they did a good job of cutting through the chilli.

Onto the hotpot fillings! The menu is pretty well served with vegetarian plates, all of which were vegan. Steph took charge, ordering us enough dishes to cover every square inch of our table. We had two plates of the potato slices ($5 a pop), plates of pumpkin and lotus root slices ($5 each), Chinese cabbage ($5), seaweed threads ($5), a mushroom combo ($18), topped up with some bonus oyster mushrooms ($7), a plate of dried tofu sticks ($5), frozen tofu ($5), two plates of potato noodles ($5 each) and two of the rice vermicelli ($5 each). Look at it all!

Eating it all was a super fun experience - there's a bit of an art to knowing how hot to make the pot and how long to cook each of the bits and pieces. The potato, for example, goes quite quickly from being undercooked to falling apart - there's a sweet spot, but you've got to pay attention to make sure you hit it. It's worth the concentration. Throwing some noodles in the pot is crucial - the potato noodles in particular were slippery and delicious. The mushrooms were also outstanding, particularly if you cooked them in the mushroom pot and then dunked them in your condiment combo. My favourite was probably the frozen tofu - it quickly thaws itself out in the hotpot and soaks up all its flavours (it, along with the potatoes, worked the best in the chilli stock I'd say).

The hotpot experience is best enjoyed with a big group - it has the double benefits of letting you choose loads of dishes and giving you people to lazily chat to as you steadily pick at all your food. They happily top up your soup pots as the night goes on so if you over-order like we did you can basically sit there all night, waiting for your second (and third) wind to dive back in again. I'm not sure that anything quite hit the heights of some of the regular dishes at the South Yarra restaurant, but we had a great time sampling all of these goodies. If you're after a similar experience, the South Yarra Dainty Sichuan has a bunch of hotpot tables along with their other options, but only the hotpot focussed Box Hill place has the full condiment station, so it might be worth the trip east.

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There are heaps of reviews of the other Dainty Sichuans (see our previous post for a round-up), but only The Simple Eater has made the trek out to Box Hill.

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Dainty Sichuan

Level 1, 2a Cambridge Street, Box Hill
9041 4318
stock bases $6-8, veg elements $5-18 (we paid about $30pp for more food than we could conceivably consume)
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Accessibility: Dainty Sichuan is up a flight of stairs - I don't remember seeing a lift anywhere, but I wasn't looking that closely. Once you're upstairs it's a big space with a reasonable amount of space. Ordering and payments is at the table. We didn't visit the toilets.