Hot Pot @ Happy Valley Chinese Kitchen

7611 Edmonds Street, Burnaby, BC

Price Range: $$

Rating: 3.0 (I will need a second visit, however)

Dine in/Take out: Both

On Wednesday I had the chance to check out Happy Valley Chinese Kitchen, a restaurant located near Edmonds and Canada Way. I purchased a few coupons for the place from LivingSocial, the daily deal site, and went with the family to check it out.

Happy Valley is not to be confused with Happy Valley Seafood on Lougheed Hwy. That being said, Happy Valley Chinese Kitchen offers bubble tea, standard Cantonese/Taiwanese food, and hot pot. We opted for the latter. Hot pot can be quite expensive, as it is all-you-can-eat; it was $18.99 a person, plus $7 for each soup. We ordered two kinds of soups: the satay and original, which was just a standard, clear broth.

It’s quite difficult to go wrong with hot pot, so I have no complaints. The soup was tasty, and there were a lot of items on the menu.

Despite the pleasant demeanour of the adorable Chinese woman who owns the place, I found that service was quite slow for a non-busy time/day.

For dessert, you can choose ice cream, deep fried banana or red bean soup (a sweet Chinese red bean dessert). We chose the deep fried banana and ordered a side of ice cream.

The vanilla ice cream was really good, and tasted like it was good quality. However, the deep fried bananas were weird. They cut up the banana into bite-sized pieces before frying them – I was expecting at least half a banana. It was definitely not like the Malaysian deep-fried banana, but still sweet and crispy.

I definitely have to come back in order to decide if I really like the place or not, as I didn’t try their regular menu. The prices of the non-hot pot items are quite low, which is promising. Additionally, they have live music on Fridays and Saturdays – which could be good or bad.