Flaming Spice

After attending the Totoro themed birthday party, we had plans to dine at Flaming Spice in LA, an all you can eat hot pot restaurant, with Kung Food Panda, Pinoy Panda, The Roaming Belly and RB’s husband. We haven’t had a chance to go back since our initial visit, which we had really enjoyed.

Since Flaming Spice is all you can eat, we didn’t do our usual massive LA eating. Instead we passed the time hanging out with KFP and PinoyPanda, including a visit to the Hsi Lai Temple, considered the largest Buddhist temple in the US. More details about that in a future post.

Things have changed a bit from our first visit. Instead of the dim sum carts being pushed around with all the raw ingredients, we ordered from a menu of ingredients and then they would bring out everything to us in a metal cart. Of course you can always add more to your order. I noticed right away that the raw ingredient options had increased and even included some thing I haven’t yet found outside of Taiwan, like black tripe! We also ordered some items I don’t normally order, like pig brains…

Like before, there’s quite a few hot pot broths to choose from. See pictures of the menu at the end of the post. We opted for oxtail and beer duck. We really loved the oxtail which had pieces of oxtail inside too. The beer duck was spicy and you couldn’t taste that it was duck or beer or anything. All I tasted was spice. I think from now on I’ll just stick to the oxtail.

There is an array of cooked dishes to go along with your hot pot. Since the restaurant was pretty empty when I arrived, I decided to take pictures of all the cooked foods.  I was a fan of the spicy fish, the seaweed appetizer, and the steamed egg. DH liked the spicy wontons.

Lamb potstickers, spicy wontons, spicy fish, seaweed salad

Sesame glutinous rice ball, fried bun, seaweed salad, green onion pancake

Steamed egg, Spicy wontons

Spicy wontons

Here are pictures of the cooked food options:

Here’s the do-it-yourself sauce station

Here’s a picture of our raw ingredients, including the pig brains.


The individual pictures are pig brain, taro, konnyaku jelly, pork blood, beef, and fish balls shaped to look like fried tofu. We also had all the usual like lamb, pork, napa cabbage, tofu, mushrooms, clams. They usually have oysters but didn’t have them that night. I have to confess, I couldn’t bring myself to try the pig brains after seeing it raw. I think Pinoy Panda ate it all though.

Black tripe!

I’ve only seen black tripe in Taiwan. It’s offered at all the hot pot places. It doens’t look so pretty raw. The texture is much rougher and chewier than white tripe. I actually prefer white tripe, but black tripe is healthier, which is why it’s become so popular in Taiwan and it’s not bleached like white tripe is.

Another thing they added is a shaved ice station. It’s pretty basic and they use one of the home shaved ice makers that I actually own. They do have some good toppings like mangoes though.

Overall, we had a good time here. I haven’t found anything here that compares to the awesome hot pots in Taiwan, but this is my favorite hot pot in California.  For about $20 per person, there’s a lot of ingredients to choose from of pretty high quality, lots of broth choices, and some tasty cooked food options too.

Here’s the full menu:

My first post can be found here.

Flaming Spice
18518 Gale Ave
Industry, CA 91744
(626) 964-6569