Kungfu Hotpot BBQ — Restaurant in Newark

While I do not claim to be a connoisseur of Hot Pot restaurants, I do enjoy visiting them on occasion and my experience at Kung Fu hot pot was disappointing, at best!

I entered the restaurant with my wife to an empty cashier's booth with no hostess pedestal or signs about seating. We stood for several minutes as staff passed us by before finally being noticed by someone after almost 7 minutes of waiting. The person who brought us to the table it's just if we were sharing a large hot pot or we would have individual hot pots and left this at the table without menus or any further instruction.

After almost 10 minutes waiting at the table, a server approached us and asked what kind of broth we wanted. We had to ask him what was available selected our broth and he repeatedly mentioned something about a 30 minute wait time, but no matter how many times we asked him to repeat himself we couldn't understand what we were being told. Not 2 minutes after that server left another server came to the table with the tablet in hand and asked again what kind of broth we wanted. After repeating our order he went away without any further instructions. My wife began fiddling with the tablet and realized that we had to order our food selections through the tablet. As she began ordering a server return to our table asking about our broth again making some comment about confusion over bone broth. He went away again without any further instructions.

Comparatively, I found the selections on the Hot pot menu to be very limited! There were only a handful of vegetable choices and the very limited selection of balls.

When are broth arrived at the table my wife's Roth was incorrect but we were unable to get the the attention of a server to correct it. The meats, vegetables, balls, and tofu we ordered arrived shortly thereafter missing a great number of items that we had ordered on our first selection. We had to order a second selection to get this corrected.

Beverage choices were cans of pop which you could pick out of the refrigerator at your convenience. It appeared they offered other beverages on the menu but I did not further investigate that. Their selection of dipping sauces was extraordinarily limited to five choices and access to them was challenging as the source bar was candy corner to the door to the restrooms and to an awkward corner near the pop machine where people were coming and going.

Overall the quality of the food wasn't terrible, although I'm almost 100% sure that the black fungus I was served was spoiled. The witch stuff was in attentive, it took over 45 minutes before anyone came to check to see if we needed to have our broth refreshed. They weren't collecting used dishes and a large pile of them had developed by the time they came to check the broth.

The seating was awkward, the double-sided booths were on wheels or casters so when you needed to stand up to do anything the booth seat moved interrupting the neighbors sitting behind you.

The the music playing was it an unbearably loud volume, comparable to the loudness of a nightclub. It detracted from my experience and made casual conversation very difficult as my wife could only hear me across the table if I raised my voice to speak to her.

When someone came to collect the plates, I asked for a check, and we were directed just to go to the cashier's booth on the way out without any check. This felt strange to me. That said, it was slightly less than $25 per person, which I thought was a good value.

My overall experience at Kung Fu was not pleasant. This is not a restaurant I would return to and we're at the first time I was ever trying hot pot I don't think I would ever return to one again based on my experience tonight. I give the restaurant credit for the convenience of available pop as a beverage and the affordability of the price per person, but beyond that the eating experience was at best mediocre, the seating was uncomfortable, and the...

My son had been raving about this restaurant for quite some time. Him and a good friend of his visited this restaurant during a weekday and he raved about the service, the food, and the atmosphere. He had been asking to take me back and we continuously had to put it off for one reason or another. Today 9/13/2025, we were finally able to go! We got there about 15 minutes after they open. Immediately when we came through the door the man who waited on us was not a good server, he did not show us any type of real customer service, he did seem to be very attentive to the people who were sitting across from us. We ordered several things off of the menu that they on the tablet that you select the items that you want to dip into your broth pot. Female server brought us 1 plate of noodles when we asked for two, they bought us a plate of the beef with fat, and one with the prime ribeye. We were also supposed to have some other meats, and more noodles because it was for the two of us we were there for 20 minutes I asked ask for more napkins they only gave us one napkin, they only provide you with chopsticks, most people don't know how to use chopsticks, when I asked for a fork they brought me back a plastic fork they didn't ask me what type of fork I wanted, they just brought back a plastic fork which I cannot stick in the boiling pot of broth because it will melt in there, (My bad, for thinking, that, they would have automatically given me a metal fork. I'll do better🙄). They were supposed to come back by periodically and fill up our pots, they filled up the other Patriots pots. My son's pot had burned out all of the broth and the noodles started to scorch in the bottom of the pot he had to actually turn the device off that bulls the pot from underneath of the table. The male server that was serving us never came back to our table to ask this if we needed anything or to offer anything. The woman server comes by to feel the broth pots and she comes towards our table and she stands in front of us, stops ... And then turns and goes across to the other Patriots that were sitting across from us. When she gets over to us to ask if we want any more broth, I told her "No" we would like to have our order changed from the premium meal to the regular meal because we only got a small fraction of the things that we ordered to dip in our pots. My son and I have never experienced such a bad experience before in a restaurant. Keep in mind, my son raved about this place when he went before with his friend. But my son and his friend are not the same race, and unfortunately sometimes who you are with can dictate how you're treated, and that could be good or bad. My son and I left that restaurant feeling very unwelcome, insignificant when it came to the willingness to provide great customer service, and downright like we didn't belong there. That is something that I hope no one else ever has to...

First time. Last time.

We told them it was our first time there. The server kindly went through the menu options that you will choose from an ipad. There are a variety of ingredients to choose from. There aren't any preselected or "signature" options for someone who may not want to customize their order. We weren't sure which ingredients would be best to mix together, so we ended up picking things we thought we would like.

The broth comes out. We wait for it to heat up as it rests on the stove in the center of the table. Then the ingredients came. The ingredients will all be uncooked. The meat is thinly sliced, rolled up, and frozen. We ordered several types of meat, but with our unskilled eyes, they were hard to distinguish. We also ordered some veggies, an egg, and some noodles. The egg had to be cooked as well (found out the hard way).

We dumped all the ingredients in the broth and let it cook. But as time passed we thought maybe we should have left some of the ingredients out since the meat became tough after a while. It's a fondue style dish.

We chose two different broths. One was a beef bone broth. The other was spicy. The beef broth tasted like water. The spicy broth was pretty good, but much more spicy than I anticipated.

Here's the thing. We are being served soup. But we have plates in front of us. No bowls? I didn't think to ask for a bowl because I figured it would have been provided already. So we are basically eating soup from a plate! Lol. Maybe I should have asked because apparently there are bowls available. We didn't know that until we decided to leave.

We were offered additional broth to top off our pot. Sure. But it was one type of broth. We weren't even sure what kind it was. The mystery broth was poured into both our beef bone and spicy broths.

After a while we had enough. We wanted to leave. We weren't sure how to pay. We also wanted to take some home. I had to hunt someone down to let them know we are ready to pay. Apparently you have to take the iPad up to the cashier. They trust customers to handle their expensive tech just to pay the bill?

We asked if we could take some home because there was so much left over and I wouldn't mind finishing it later. I don't like wasting food. We didn't realize it was technically a buffet! So it against their policy to take food home even if they are going to dump it out anyway. I understand that's a buffet policy, but I really did not think this was a buffet. It didn't seem to be advertised as such. But it makes sense now.

We really didn't know what we were getting into when we came here. We knew it was a fondue style meal, but everything else seemed bizarre.

Service was not accommodating, but now that we know it is a buffet it's to be expected.

For what it is it's actually pretty good. But you need to have realistic expectations when you...