Four Seasons: Hot Pot Buffet

Celebrating my birthday, we availed the birthday promo of a Four Seasons, a hot pot buffet. The celebrant gets to eat for free when dining on the exact date of birth provided that at least one full paying adult comes along.


Stations

There are a number of stations where you can get ingredients for your hot pot. From the common fish balls, sausages, dumplings, to innards, seafood and meat. They even have a premium station if you are looking for more sophisticated ingredients (although you have to pay additional per ingredient from the premium station).

What you can find at some of the stations:

Fish, squid, shrimp, shell fish and more seafood...

Liver, gizzard, innards, and other parts...

Dimsum and dumplings..

More dumplings...

Sausages, crab cakes, dimsum...

Condiments...

They also offer salad and appetizer.

Salad station...

Sushi and maki...

A vegetable wall, beverage area, and dessert station are also available.


Hot pot time!

Step 1: choose two soups for the base. We chose seafood and pork. In the photo below, we already put some of the dimsum and dumplings in.

Step: 2: Put in your ingredients. Aside from the dimsum and dumplings, we put in a number of seafood too.

Tried out eel. It turned out okay but the skin part is slippery for me.

Also tried the sea mantis. It's kind of a cross between a shrimp and a lobster and a crab. It's quite a task to shell it though.

Hoisin sauce, oyster sauce, ginger and garlic in the four black bowls.
Some dried squid in the round white bowl, scallops in the small square bowl
Parrot fish meat and squid in the two square bowls below.

Here we have a variety of meat slices.

Ah, the empty containers of seafood.

Cooked

Seafood

Shrimp, scallops, squid, crab, eel, sea mantis

Dumplings and mini sausages

Dessert

Assorted desserts and tea

The four desserts on the left half: banoffee pie, coffee jelly, revel bar, and guava panna cotta.
The apple cinnamon and raisin tea was good too.

Yogurt

Sprinkles and mallows are staple toppings on my yogurt. Since there are no cornflakes, I settled with Koko crunch for a cereal-y touch.


Usually, we stay for around 2 hours in a buffet place since we get quite full after an hour and a half. This time, we stayed for almost 4 hours. Perhaps an hour or so was spent on cooking and shelling the food. We did not get to eat as much in an hour compared to when we just get ready to eat food from trays.

My opinion on cook your own food is still the same - it's an additional task to cook your food when you can just get ready to eat food elsewhere, but cooking it yourself is part of the whole dining experience.

And here are some of my favorite dining experiences of the night:
I got to try the sea mantis for the first time. It is kind of hard to remove the shell, but I ended up eating a few of those.
We got curious about the "home made cuttlefish noodles" which turned out to have the same taste the same as squid balls, but in noodle form.
The apple cinnamon & raisin tea is a perfect companion for dessert.
I also got to make my own yogurt concoction again.

At Four Seasons, you are able to decide what goes in your hot pot may it be dimsum, seafood, vegetables, or meat. By using the condiments, you can adjust the taste according to your liking. So if you are into hot pot and customization, this place is a buffet of ingredients and your table is your own kitchen.

Branch visited located at: SM by the Bay, SM Mall of Asia, Pasay City