Hippot Shabu Shabu’s Excellent Lunch Deal

This is what happens at a hot pot restaurant: you get raw meat, uncooked noodles and a pot of broth and prepare to have the time of your life (or at least a fun lunch).

Considering that until recently Philadelphia had no shabu shabu restaurants, it’s pretty exciting that we now have two (soon to be three, with Nine Ting). Shabu shabu is not just me stuttering on the page. It’s the name of a special kind of cook-your-own Asian noodle soup.

Hippot Shabu Shabu can get somewhat pricey if you go for dinner (because you’ll invariably look at the menu with pages of meats, noodles, and balls and want to try them all) Unfortunately, those little additions all come at a cost (usually about $3.95 a pop, to be precise), and that’s on top of $10-$20 you’re paying for the soup itself.

But then there’s Hippot Shabu Shabu’s lunch deal.

It works like this: $8.95 will get you an individual pot of shabu, a choice of noodles (and it’s quite a choice: fishmeat noodles, potato noodles, shanghai noodles, udon noodles, vermicelli, bean vermicelli, or instant noodles), and chicken, beef, lamb or pork. Alternatively, you can get the soup, noodles and seafood for $10.50.

I’m not awesome at math, but I do have a calculator, so I figured this out: at dinner, if you’re ordering broth, udon noodles, and lamb, you’d pay $21.85. At lunch, you’re getting all of that for $8.95. That’s a 60% discount, which is a helluva deal.

Hippot Shabu Shabu [f8b8z]