Happy Lamb Hot Pot, Murray 快乐小羊 — Restaurant in Murray

I had been skeptical about trying out a hot pot restaurant for a while, mostly because I had an impression that the learning curve for hot pot is higher than Korean BBQ. That change when I happened to see Happy Lamb just open this very week as I made my home from work. I checked this place out on Google Maps to get an idea of what's inside and the fact most of the items for the hot pot are available in a buffet meaning I could choose at my own pace. So, I decided to dip my toe in and try some hot pot. Since this place just opened, it's very clean and upscale. But more objectively, since this place is just a hot pot restaurant, the tables are arranged around one large glass-ceramic heating surface. Buffet is centralized in the restaurant with one side having all the raw ingredients to put in your hot pot - your basic seafood, your basic meats (yes, that includes Spam) and your vegetable options. The other side has a few choices for appetizers as well as your sauce bar and soda fountain. While the choices for the sauce bar is a little less extensive than oh, say KPot's selection for their dipping sauces, I think it's just right as some of the choices KPot has is also geared towards Korean BBQ. Now onto the main part of the show; Happy Lamb is a AYCE hot pot with three pricing tiers. The "value" meal is basically access to all the options in the buffet. However, if you want the thin-sliced meats similar to the Korean BBQ offerings, you will pay a bit extra. Some options open up at $26 for their "VIP" offerings and even more premium options at $32; to be honest, the upgraded tier names should be swapped around. Even then, when you do pay a bit extra, those meat options are AYCE as well. You also get your choice of broths to cook your food in as well. They didn't have their mushroom broth when I ate today, but, they had everything else available. I tried the tomato broth and the spicy bone broth; of the two, I think the tomato broth was the better of the two I had. The spicy broth is supposed to be "mildly" spicy as the server stated it, but do offer your additional peppers to increase the heat, but I found all those pepper pods a little hard to get my ingredients out of the broth...and they are like bayleaves - you really can't eat them. When I come back, I will try their regular bone broth and use the dipping sauce to add heat to my food. The two choices I had from the VIP menu I very much liked - I had the pork and beef belly and both were really good. They take only 15-30 seconds (per the server) to cook, though I would recommend about 35 seconds to make sure no pink remains on the meat. There's a decent variety of vegetables too - those take about a minute or two and if you like stews or soups, many of them work quite well. Noodles take about 3 mintues and seafood about 5 minutes (which as of my visit today, includes live crabs - though I might shy away because my meal too two hours as it was). Only downside is that they have no lo mein noodles - though do have udon, vermicelli rice noodles and ramen noodles. Overall the service was good, not world-breaking. They are able to answer your questions on cooking your ingredients in the hot pot. though sometimes it is a while between them visiting your table and to be honest, despite the soda fountain being self-service...I would like the option to have my server help me with refills when I'm mid-hot potting my food. My normal critique though of not having teas is mitigated because of how the menu is setup...and if you are stuck in a long wait for your table, they do have some tea up front in the waiting area. I would love to see their service improve and their food offerings refined though I think it's good enough to earn it a five-star rating, but for now mostly on the atmosphere but the food is close. But I would still recommend giving...

We went in at 2:00 on a Friday afternoon. They were busier than we expected and parking was a little difficult. Upon entering, the hostess asked us which "package" we would be ordering. I have never experienced this type of dining before so I was a little confused by the question. She explained the two options, we made our choices, and we're seated. Broth was set up at our table and heated to a rolling boil. Shortly thereafter trays of raw meat were brought out for us. We explained to the waiter that this was new to us and asked if he could run down the basics once we got our food. He said he would but he never returned. Along with the meat, they have a large buffet of additional items that can be brought back to your table and cooked and a nice assortment of drink choices ranging from softdrinks, juice, tea, and boba. Not being very familiar with this type of cuisine, walking through the buffet I wasn't really sure what I was looking at so admittedly I skipped a lot of things. Conversely, in my attempt to try new things, I learned that some of the stuff is a little spicy. For the most part, the food had really good flavoring and we enjoyed what we did eat. They do have a decent display of seafood options that I avoided since I can't eat fish. Unfortunately however, One of the staff members did tell us that there was a large issue with cross-contamination of the seafood and that we should be cautious of that. The seating is comfortable but the environment is loud making conversations difficult. Although I most likely would not return (mainly because of all the seafood), I would encourage everyone to try this place out if you haven't already. It was a fun experience at a...

food quality: 4/5 service: 5/5 cleanliness: 5/5 value: 4/5

Tried out Happy Lamb Hot Pot, one of the new hot pot places in Salt Lake! This is another hot pot place that offers Chinese style hot pot with a variety of different meats, veggies, and starches. The staff was welcoming when we walked in and there was a cotton candy machine up front for guests to make their own. I was surprised that it was up front, assuming they need someone to tend to it constantly, but I don’t expect the machine to be around long. Before the night was over (8PM) they had already shut down the machine stating it was too messy.

The choices for meat were decent and had two options - VIP with 7 meats or Premium to have the 7 plus an additional 8 meats. There were a few of the items try at you could get at the buffet, so I don’t feel like it was advertised accurately. Not really worth the extra $5 per person to get the premium, but had to try it.

The food at the buffet was mostly refilled, but the drinks (milk tea and passionfruit green tea) which are included in the price paid, were not refilled the entire time we were there. By 7:30PM on Sunday, they were out and had no plans to refill.

Our party of 6 fit into the booth with no problem, but the 2 people in the middle had a difficult time coming their food since the pots were further away. I think the design could have been better or maybe that table should not have seated 6.

Other than that, it was overall a...