Early on before the recent blow up of all the fancy new hot pot places in Sydney this year, there was Chuansticks! I remember seeing the cute and characteristic Hello Kitty shaped soup bases on various Instagram posts and thinking, oh yeah I've been there.. only to later find out that it was not the same place and there was a lot more to this foodie scene.
Every day I feel like a new hot pot restaurant pops up in our city but I've yet to hear more about Chuansticks. When telling one of my work friends about this place after I had gone here, she excitedly exclaimed that she had also been here and described Chuansticks as an "authentic Chengdu stick hot pot". Because she's originally from China and has a huge love for Sichuan cuisine, I definitely trust her opinion on this one!
So is it worth it or just another hot pot restaurant to add to the block?
Keep reading to find out! 😙
My girl Anna and I went to catch up over dinner after work but we hadn't decided on a place. She works in Burwood so there is a tonne of new restaurants to try! It was super overwhelming but in the end we decided on this brightly lit shop front nearby the Westfield shopping center despite having no clue of the reviews, what type of food they served, or how to eat it. It just looked fun, popular and exciting.
The display window featured selections such as duck head, pig trotters, chicken feet and tripe which could typically scare people away especially if they are from a culture that doesn't normally eat these things. Yet it's extremely popular with much of the locals!
It was when we entered the restaurant that we realised it was a hot pot restaurant. Perfect for what we were after. Hot pot is such a social meal where everyone becomes a chef and can cook what they want to eat at their own pace. Super good for catching up over some good food! Plus the delicious and warm smell of spicy soup in the air was so fragrant and mouth watering, you'll definitely develop an appetite!
Downstairs was very cool and trendy with the graffiti wall decor contrasting nicely with the sleek, brassy and geometrical designs of the rest of the place. However despite the restaurant not being too busy the waiters led us upstairs to a nice and more quiet dining area. The service was extremely good as they were really friendly to us and explained how the menu and pricing worked seeing it was our very first time here.
The instructions are as on the menu above! You first choose a soup base, the spiciness level, and then are free to collect what sauces and foods you like from the open buffet fridge sections. The final price is based on the soup you choose, the plates of food you collected from the buffet, as well as the final weight of the skewer sticks.
The white bucket is for placement of your empty sticks so that they can weigh it at the end, and the black trays are for the sticks and other food you can collect from the buffet station.
Sauces - Sesame Oil, Chilli Powder and access to the sauce bar, $3.50 per person
We're also given a can of sesame oil (definitely not to be mistaken for a drink!!!) which we are initially confused as what to do with it. The waiter suggests make our own dipping sauces mixed in with the other options available at the sauce station pictured below, or pouring it directly into the hot pot if we prefer a less spicy taste. We didn't follow the latter suggestion as the hotpot was also quite oily.
The additional plate had a dry chilli seasoning in it for the same purposes - dipping sauce or soup enhancer.
Sauce station pictured to the right which had condiments such as garlic, spring onions, vinegar, oyster sauce and coriander. Not a huge selection unfortunately but apparently quite authentic and traditional.
While I usually assume sauce is an essential to hot pot, paying $3.50 per person is a little hefty to me. This appears to be a compulsory cost as we weren't asked whether we would like this added on, and I don't see how they could stop any one from accessing the sauce station.
House special Beef Tallow spicy soup base $21.80
Our cute Hello Kitty shaped soup base.You can also get other shapes but the Hello Kitty is definitely way too cute to pass up. Almost too cute to even add to the soup. The soup base is made out of spicy flavours and beef tallow (fat) which give the hotpot soup a more enhanced and oily flavour that is signature to Chengdu hotpot. Looking at the Hello Kitty, this is A LOT of fat going into the soup. But at the time I didn't realise what it was made out of and didn't feel the soup became too oily.
To be honest, Anna and I felt a little ripped off by paying an extra ~$20 for this. While we didn't taste the spicy soup without additional base added it's an expensive add-on to the already decently-priced soups (pictured below). I love cute things like this because of my love for Instagram-worthy foods but I probably would rethink paying for this in the future if there's not a lot of people dining together because when you look at the bigger picture... we paid a little over $40 for soup.
Double-flavour Hotpot $19.80
We opted for the half and half soups to be able to try more! My chilli tolerance is so shockingly low but if I went to a Sichuan hot pot and didn't try the spicy soup, would I really have been at a Sichuan hot pot? The soups we chose were "House special Spicy" and I think a "Beef and pork stock soup base". The former was incredibly mouth-numbingly spicy even though we had selected the lowest spice level for my waiguo ass. I pretty much died and cried and died and cried. But I ADMIT the taste was pretty great and every time the burning in my mouth died down, I'd crave it all over again. So a a tiny little bit better than Shancheng's spicy which really traumatised me. The smell was also very aromatic and fragrant. The latter was a typical clear soup base which provided the perfect contrast and relief from all the sweating we were doing over the chilli.
My tip is to just be careful of the cross-contamination that can occur from your spoons or chopsticks going from the spicy soup to the clear soup because this very quickly makes both sides spicy and you will have no pain relief 😭
The buffet selection was pretty neat and tidy with the staff regularly stocking empty trays and cleaning the area up. Meat and offal were divided to one side while seafoods and vegetables were on the other. The variety was decent but there's not a lot of options I would personally reach for. It definitely could be so much more. Everything was refrigerated and cold. The pricing for sticks is weighed at the end in the bucket with it roughly costing around 80c per stick, while round plates are $4.80, curvy bowls $5.80, rectangular plates $6.80 and square plates $8.80.
So basically all you need to know is noodles are around an extra $5. Which isn't terrible considering some other places I've been to charge a lot more, but the portion is very small.
(I noticed a pattern in the pricing here with the number "8" similar to Hulu at King Street Wharf! Lucky number!)
A few of the stick selections we tried on our first round! It was all nice and quite tasty. Some of the meat was even marinated in a unique mix of spices. I really liked the cumin beef! BUT the amount of meat or other food on the sticks was so shocking. It was the tiniest and I repeat the TINIEST little morsel. Which doesn't help by the fact that things tend to shrink and shrivel a fair bit when they're cooked. And when you look at it as 80c per stick, this is actually a rip off. Similarly, 80c for 1 fish ball on a stick or for 2 quail eggs on a stick makes me pretty upset. The concept was really fun but the pricing works out unfairly in my opinion. Add more meat/food on these sticks and we'll be okay but not like this.
Square plate - Assorted Fish Cakes $8.80
A good way to try a lot of different fish cakes which aren't on the sticks. Pretty standard fish cakes that you can get at the frozen section in any Asian supermarket but a nice selection nonetheless.
I love that I briefly mentioned to Anna I was worried that the smells would cling to my work uniform and a few minutes later one of the waiters adds these little brown aprons to our table. They don't stop the smell clinging entirely but helps with any splashing that may occur!
When we finally put the Hello Kitty base into the soup...
😭 NO 😭
In the end I look fondly back at Chuansticks as one of my more newer and exciting hot pot experiences. It does have it's highs such as friendly and helpful staff, great tastes, and a range of authentic options. But the pricing system against the tiny portions per stick really holds me back from enjoying myself and having a good meal. I think if they introduce more sauces and make the portions on the sticks more abundant then that's a huge improvement. In the mean time their most recent reviews reveal that this hasn't changed so if you visit Chuansticks do keep this in mind!
Any more recommendations for new hot pot places I should visit? Please leave them down below! Maybe I've been maybe I haven't but lots of reviews coming soon! 😍
TL;DR:
Price: The total really does add up and can be quite expensive!
Quality: Pretty great authentic tastes, but not largely special
Service: Friendly and helpful!!
Ambience: Gets quite busy at dinner time. Restaurant has cool decor and is spacious
Chuansticks
130 Burwood Road
Burwood NSW 2134
Open 7 days a week
12PM - 10:30PM
