CCP Complex’s Mini Shabu-Shabu branch is the best Hot Pot restaurant in Manila

Here, a sampler is served with all base ingredients—vegetables, supreme stock or broth, a piece of chicken egg, sate (ground mixture of fermented shrimp and anchovies in olive oil,) and a choice of meat or seafood platter—for self cooking.

One can always crack an egg—separate the yolk, and use the white as a stuffer to the boiling broth for better stock-flavor—use the yolk to concoct it with a house soy-sauce, waiting to be hinted with finely chopped garlic, spring onions, and labuyo-bits to create a personalized dip.

In this restaurant, mini oriental victuals—as squid balls, chicken balls, kani, sowe (fish cake) egg-cake-roll, shitake, button mushrooms, and taro—are always good fillers to a hot boil, but are bliss-makers if soaked with one’s personal sauce (of a mixture of sate, egg yolk, soy sauce, chopped garlic and spring onions with a high doze of chili peppers) as one pops them inside the mouth before the fresh chili-steam caresses the palate, soared enough for a cold-frost Coca-Cola to temper.

Such ingredients are part of different platter packages of meat or seafood, with lettuce, kuckay leaves, and rice and flour noodles.

Of course, thin slices of US Black Angus Beef, Pork meat, lamb, prawn, oyster, squid cuts, and noodles that add up to enhance the flavor and the experience, will always work with the sate-base sauce and will surely complement any fresh fruit shake.

Clearly, Mini Shabu-Shabu restaurant is not just a good place to experiment with food—of preferential taste—but also for a quality time with the family.

Rib-eye slices and lamb-papers with good clear marbling are always available to kick-up the tang of a boiling broth, well enough, to create a chili version of noodles with vegetables.

However, a thickening soup with over-poached taro will amazingly work with a pork-slice or a tenderloin sheet especially when the garlic is strong enough in the broth. This will work better with a perfectly boiled flour noodles.

For people (especially women) who hate to eat meat, a combination-boil of prawns with sea-cucumber and oysters will incredibly create a seafood soup, especially when the rice noodle is to be used, and can be more flavorful when a peal of lettuce and carrot-slices are added to counter the brine.

There is a million and one satisfaction to this restaurant that Filipinos need to discover—besides a good talk, and the idea, by true enjoyment, of learning how to cook—as "when one fails a good eat, this time, one need not worry…. Next time, you can always make it better."

Though, most of this restaurant’s offers are base ingredients, one is always bound to stretch his/her own gustatory adventure, which by culinary rule, is the base of all gastronomic satisfaction.