Six of One: Getting to Know My Friends Over Hot Pot on the Isle of Dogs
Six of One: Getting to Know My Friends Over Hot Pot on the Isle of Dogs
London's best old-school hot pot, tacos and empañadas, jerk bagels, jerk summers, pie, mash, jellied eels and more
Hello and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants.
Six of One is a column dedicated to London restaurant recommendations. In each issue, six writers will share a restaurant, bakery, cafe or takeaway spot that they believe deserves to be better known. You can find the full Six of One back catalogue here.
Today’s Six of One recommendations are from Siqi Chong, Tommy Gilhooly, Yanyu Sun, Jonathan Nunn, Thea Everett, and Adam Coghlan.
To read all the recommendations, as well as the back catalogue, please subscribe below.
1. Mailinda
It is often said that how you get to know a culture is through its meals. Similarly, I believe that through sharing hotpot, you get to know someone's personality. Are they considerate? Do they cook only what they want to eat? Or do they cook and serve everyone else as well? Are they methodical in adding ingredients according to cooking time, or impatient, adding all ingredients in simultaneously, cooking times be damned? Hotpot to me is an intimate affair. More than a shared meal, it is a team endeavour that creates a delicious experience for everyone at the table.
In Mailinda, a small neighbourhood restaurant, this social activity takes place in its various permutations surrounded by steam and the fragrance of chilli oil. It is located on the Isle of Dogs, which houses one of the highest concentrations of Chinese migrants in London, where within a one-mile radius there are four Chinese supermarkets and close to 30 Chinese restaurants.
Unlike most restaurants, which use induction or gas pots, Mailinda remains charmingly old-school, using copper pots heated with burning charcoal piled in its hollow chimney centre. Hotpot customers choose from a selection of soup bases and enjoy unlimited orders of ingredients during the course of a two-hour slot. The standard offering, at £27.50 pp, includes classics like thinly sliced meats, tripe, frog legs, a seafood selection brought in from nearby Billingsgate Market and an array of vegetables, noodles and bean curd products. The premium offering is £35 pp, which includes additional items like crispy fried pork, hand-pulled noodles, beef tongue and various types of pig offal, which can be separately ordered at £5 a serving.
Here, the soups are fragrant without being overpowering and ingredients are fresh and plentiful. A highlight is the fish slices, which are silky from its cornstarch dredge and coated in spicy, numbing beef fat like a luxury version of Sichuan boiled fish. The crispy pork is also particularly well prepared, where the pork remains moist while crispy with a thin batter dusted with chilli, cumin and sesame.
Besides hotpot, Mailinda has a menu of northeastern dishes, while my favourite way to end a hotpot dinner is with a bowl of glutinous rice balls in rice wine. This is a mild, sweet, egg drop soup scattered with fermented rice and chewy rice balls, which soothes the palate after the shock of spices.
It doesn't have a website but reservations can be made via phone (020 7987 0277) or WeChat. Siqi Chong
62 Mellish St, E14 8NS
Behind the paywall: An 70-year-old pie, mash and eel shop in Leytonstone, giving a pan-Chinese restaurant a second chance, Bolivian-Mexican possibilities on the Old Kent Road, when bagels meet jerk in Anerley, and saying farewell to summer in Dalston’s Gillett Square.