Valentine’s Day is quickly approaching. If you haven’t made plans yet, then pressure is officially on. Whether you want to hang out with friends or go on a date, you’ll want to create a memorable experience for the people you love. In a mad rush to find an engaging activity for Valentine’s Day, I stumbled across a restaurant called Shabu Zone, and it blew me away.
Shabu Zone, named after Shabu-Shabu (a type of Japanese hotpot), offers an interactive hotpot experience, perfect for family, friends and significant others. This restaurant resides in Houston’s Hong Kong City Mall, around 15 miles away from Carnegie Vanguard High School. With a variety of soup bases, flavourful sauces, all-you-can-eat meats and a buffet of veggies for the price of $22.99 per person, it is a great-tasting, reasonable option for a Valentine’s Day treat.
The restaurant itself is visually stunning, offering a warm atmosphere with lights that mimic paper lanterns and a large skylight above the buffet area. The buffet is neatly arranged, including five main stations; sides, sauces, vegetables, seafood and carbs. Servers maintain the cleanliness of tables, often clearing excess dishes and wiping away any spills. The variety of items available is astounding, and for the price of $32.99, you gain access to all buffet stations, including the seafood and carbs stations, along with the entire meat menu.
When you are first seated, your server will give you a general overview of the menu and instructions on how to cook various ingredients in your hotpot soup base, so there is no need to worry if you are inexperienced with hotpot restaurants. You are given eight options for your soup base, which include basic dashi stock, spicy soup base, miso soup, Tonkotsu broth, shoyu broth, sukiyaki soup, vegetable broth and Tom Yum soup. All soup bases are essentially a blank canvas, perfect for infusing with your favorite ingredients. If you like lighter soup bases, I recommend the basic dashi stock, spicy soup base and vegetable broth.
If all soup bases are essentially canvases, then the basic dashi stock is the purest canvas available. It offers a slight umami flavour produced from bonito flakes and is the most flexible base. The spicy soup base is like a reprise of the basic dashi stock, but has a slight spicy flavor that accompanies the umami background. The vegetable broth is a great option for any vegetarians or vegans, and has the strongest flavor of the three lighter soup bases. The dried vegetables used to make the broth provide an intense umami flavor, perfect for cooking various meats while still leaving room for other ingredients to shine. The most flavourful base is the Tom Yum soup, which is packed with savory and tangy notes from lime, fish sauce, and shrimp paste. The bases that exhibit the richest, meatiest flavors are the Sukiyaki base and the Tonkotsu broth, with the Tonkotsu broth being the creamiest base. Once you choose your base, you’ll get to add your own ingredients from the selection of stations available.
The vegetable station supplies an assortment of fresh mushrooms (including enoki, shittake, wood ear and bunapi mushrooms), squash, tomatoes, broccoli, various root vegetables, herbs, cabbage and peppers– perfect for developing flavor in your soup base. Mushrooms, onions, garlic and herbs give off the biggest flavor payout, while broccoli and root vegetables tend to absorb the essence of your hotpot base. All of these vegetables come together to create a unique flavor profile that can be tailored to your tastes.
The seafood buffet features quite the selection of seafood, including crab, imitation crab, calamari, muscles, clams, shrimp, scallops and more. Adding fresh seafood to your hotpot can balance super savory or spicy broths through its slightly sweet, fresh flavor. If you are a fan of shellfish, I highly recommend the mussles, as they were super fresh and soaked up the hotpot broth beautifully.
The sauce station at Shabu Zone is my personal favorite station. This area is a playground for flavors, offering an assortment of sauces and sauce-building ingredients, which can add richness, citrus notes, spicy or sweet flavors, aromatic freshness and so many other layers to your hotpot, or can be used as dipping sauces for your meat. The sauce station is comprised of the sauce bar and another section attached to the main buffet, and features house recipes and suggestions for guests to create their own sauces. A restaurant classic is the fiery ponzu, which gives a tangy kick to anything it is added to. I found that combining fish sauce, soy sauce, fiery ponzu, spicy ponzu, sesame oil, black sesame sauce, chili oil, green onion and chili powder together created a lovely, umami packed sauce, perfect for dipping meats or broth enhancement.
The meats at Shabu Zone are all thinly sliced, and cook pretty quickly in the hotpot. There are eleven meats in total to choose from, including various cuts of beef, pork, lamb and chicken, so there are options for everyone. If you choose to purchase the premium menu deal, you can order as many meats as you’d like from the full selection. The standard selection allows you to order as many plates of meat as you’d like, but your options are more limited.
The standard menu meats include wagyu chuck eye, prime rib, center cut pork loin, pork belly, chicken breast, lamb leg, and beef belly. My personal favorite meat had to be the wagyu chuck eye, as it developed a wonderful, rich flavor when cooked in the hotpot broth. The fat on the meat helped it develop a melt-in-your mouth feel, and pairing the chuck eye with thin strips of pickled radish and my personal dipping sauce created a flavorful paradise for my palete.
Shabu Zone overall delivers a delightful hotpot experience that is both interactive and delicious. Its cozy ambiance, fresh ingredients, and reasonable pricing make Shabu Zone an exceptional spot for couples, friends, and family who are looking for a fun and flavourful Valentine’s Day meal. The premium menu is definitely worth the splurge for those who love seafood and carbs, while the standard menu offers plenty of variety at a great value. Altogether, I’d rate Shabu Zone a 9/10. It is a fantastic choice for anyone seeking out a flavorful, interactive and satisfying dining experience. Shabu Zone might just be the perfect place to share a meal with someone and create lasting memories this Valentine’s Day.
