Sun Tung Kee [closed]

Occasion: Send-off dinner for me, right before my mom and brother took me to the airport
Location: Sun Tung Kee Hot Pot Restaurant on Alexandra Rd just off Kwantlen St in Richmond, a municipality of Greater Vancouver - Note: Sun Tung Kee is closed
Edibles: cilantro and thousand-year-old egg broth for cooking; fish paste; napa cabbage; taro; garlic chive dumplings; shrimp wontons; squid meatballs; pork meatballs; beef; chicken; tofu; mung bean and barley soup for dessert

Musings: Hot pot restaurants are all about the quality of their ingredients since they don't actually do any cooking; for the most part, food is brought to your table raw for you to cook in the broth.

To start with, Sun Tung Kee offers quality condiments. These include soy sauce, Asian bbq sauce, garlic sauce, sesame sauce, fresh cilantro, scallions and hot peppers. For special customers (like my mom), there's also a dish of XO sauce, a hot sauce with dried scallops, Chinese ham and cognac. They also offer seasonal live seafood like shrimp, certain fish, geoduck and Alaskan king crab. It's pricey but the absolute freshness is worth it.

The thing that really sets Sun Tung Kee apart is the quality of their beef. The difference between the usual hot pot beef and Sun Tung Kee beef is like the difference between cheesesteak "steak" and Peter Luger's steak. The beef was excellent, as always, but I noticed that the plates are about a third smaller (prices are the same). They also have a new recipe for their shrimp wontons that inexplicably includes bamboo and black wood ear fungus (not as gross as it sounds) in the filling. I liked their old wontons better.

Summer is a typically a slow season for hot pot restaurants, but the place was pretty empty even considering that. My mom theorized that Sun Tung Kee has lost a lot of business in the downturn to all-you-can-eat hot pot places nearby.