Tasty Pot 味鼎小火锅 — Restaurant in Mesa

Good, fast, and relatively inexpensive. Warning, the Sichuan soup base at "mild" is enough for most. My wife is Malaysian - we're very into spicy food - but the Sichuan is nuclear at Medium levels, unless you're FROM Sichuan province. They're crazy with the spicy there. To be fair, we WERE warned by the server, and didn't heed, so full stars. It tends to get busy, but the wait usually isn't long. We were told 20 minutes, it was more like 10, and a very cool server came out to the hall and took the majority of the order in advance, so our total wait from arrival to food hitting the table was about 12 minutes. Servers and people coming 'round to replenish the soup base were attentive. For drinks, water is cold and in a container on the table, and the Plum Lemon and Tiger's Milk were delicious (the latter serves well to tone down the meltdown reaction in your upper digestive tract if you forget and order anything other than "mild" for the Sichuan base). They also pack what you can't eat (portions are large) in rather nice to go containers, so you can have it again for lunch the next day or so, and really those containers (and the drink cups) are proving pretty useful. "We're becoming regulars!" -...

The food was decent, but the service was virtually non-existent to rude. They seated us about 40 min before closing. We promptly ordered through the website with the QR code on the table as they requested. About 15 minutes later, we got our food. We were still eating when the bill came and the male server said "here is the bill whenever you are ready". Then, 5 minutes later, a girl came and asked us to pay and said they are closing. We felt very rushed to eat our hot pot. The pot was very hot, but nobody checked to see if we wanted to turn off the fire or add more broth. Also, the tofu sauce bottle was empty, we waited so long for the attention of the server that one of us had to get up and went to the server station to get it.

The food would have been more enjoyable if we were not rushed to finish, but could not because it was too hot. We left when there were still 3 tables with other guests still hanging around finishing their meals even though we were the last ones to come in. They treated the other guests the same. So bad.

Ratings: Food - 4 stars Service - zero star Value - 3 stars Overall...

Service staff was polite, efficient and attentive.

We knew from the start that going to a hot pot restaurant in July in the metro Phoenix was an iffy idea at best. Hot soup in hot weather?? Not a good idea. But we decided to try anyway.

The beef hot soup pot was flavorful . It was filled to the brim with tasty broth and contained a variety of tofu, beef and fish balls, imitation crab, clams, mushrooms and more. I quickly discovered that adding the side noodle in to the pot caused an overflow. So I left the additional noodle in its bowl and added the hot broth there.

My wife ordered the kimchi dumpling hot pot. She was not impressed with either the kimchi or the dumplings. The kimchi tasted like cabbage with added kimchi flavor, but no fermentation. The skin of the dumplings tasted like undercooked dough, even though it was cooked through. The broth was somehow not as flavorful as the beef one, even if both pots started with the same base.

Neither of us could finish our hot pot. There was simply more food than we could handle.

We will return to this restaurant to try other dishes, but during the...