Lavender Hot Pot - Newark

After my previous review, I discovered unclean ladles and ants in my meal! Extremely unsatisfactory.

This restaurant is no longer serving halal food. The food quality, atmosphere, and service are all poor. This was a terrible dining experience.

Do not consider this restaurant as an option. Instead, I recommend going to Tasty Pot if you have a craving for hotpot. Here is why: 1. The utensils, plates, and bowls were extremely dirty. Pay attention to any oil stains or specks on your utensils, as this indicates that they were not properly washed. Additionally, I found a dead bug in my water cup. The ladle used for scooping the soup was also unclean. 2. The soups were diluted and tasteless. If you ask for a refill, they will add tap water to the soup. 3. Avoid going after 9pm, as they often run out of pork and beef, leaving only lamb and a small amount of chicken available. During my visit at 9:30pm, it seemed that the raw chicken had been reused from another table. Look out for oil stains on the raw or undercooked chicken. 4. The service was acceptable, but many of the waiters did not speak English, leading to potential miscommunication. 5. The only good food was the watermelon. The rest of the dishes seemed to be frozen, which is normal for hotpot restaurants. However, the quality of the soup was poor.

I came here three times with different friends in the past two month. The service was equally good as before covid but food quality went downhill. I am not very picky with food but the taste of the soup has changed for sure and one time I overheard a customer complaining about their shrimps were spoiled. I know is hard to keep a business running these days, but food safety and customer experience are also important. Do I recommend this place, not until they improve their quality.

They have a private room available for large group events. Each person gets their own individual soup pot and there's a bunch of different soup bases to choose from. I decided to go with a neutral Japanese miso for my base. My husband and father each went with the spicy kimchi and warning the soup actually packs quite a bit of heat. You can make your own sauce at the sauce bar and the other hot pot ingredients are served buffet style you grab your own tray and load up on the items that you want in your hot pot. For the meat, they have a cool little robot that rolls through the restaurant with trays of beef, pork, and lamb on it and you just grab what you want. Unfortunately, the robot's functionality was limited to the main area of the restaurant and not in the private room where we were located. I was actually pretty happy with the quality of the meat everything was delicious, I especially liked the lamb which didn't taste too gamey. Their dessert options could be better though they really only have a little pastry cup with a marshmallow on top and you can drizzle chocolate sauce on it. Their take of a s'more I guess. They also have a shaved ice bar with a few toppings to choose from and some condensed milk and chocolate sauce to drizzle on top.