I recently went home to spend Mother’s Day with my mom. I’ll post about it soon. But I realized just how behind I am on posting about my past Bay Area meals. I still have ones from 2011. Oops. So here’s one of the meals we had in December.
For New Year’s, my family likes to celebrate with hot pot. So over the holidays we paid a visit to Hot Pot Palace Buffet. It’s been a while since we’ve visited, but it was good to see that the place was as busy as ever. You can read about my first visit here.
Here, every guest gets an individual pot, and there are 8 different broths to choose from.
They also have a sauce station where you mix your own sauce.
The raw food section offers the standard hot pot items. The selection is decent and includes all the standards, though the selection is not as diverse as some other places specializing in hot pot. However, in addition to hot pot, they also offer some hot food items, including a pretty good selection of dim sum. Since this restaurant used to be a dim sum place before they converted it into a hot pot place, their dim sum selection is actually pretty well made. I also like that this place offers these random Costco frozen foods like chicken nuggets and bagel bites, which I can never resist eating.
Here are our broths.
The meats come in individual small plates which I like.
Here are some other hot pot ingredients we gathered.
On this occasion they had a selection of cold appetizers. Unfortunately none of them were any good.
Normally they serve fresh Thai spring rolls but they were so swamped that evening that they didn’t have the man power to make them.
Hot foods
For dessert there is shaved ice but the selection of toppings was pretty sad and they ran out of condensed milk, so i didn’t really enjoy the ice at all.
Dinner is about $16.99 per person on weekends, which is a pretty good deal considering all the food you get to choose from. I wish we had a similar AYCE hot pot offering in San Diego.
I love this shot of all the individual burners being stacked up to be refilled at the end of the night. 
Hot Pot Palace Buffet
1628 Hostetter Rd
San Jose, CA 95131
(408) 392-0566
I had this on my list to visit but I read on Yelp that this place is closed. I didn’t actually swing by to check since I didn’t have much time. If they are closed, bummer.
Eeek, I just saw yelp. Looking at the reviews, it looks like it just closed in May. That’s too bad. I’m also really surprised because when we went it was absolutely packed.
IMPOSTOR!
OMGOSH! I wish we had an AYCE hot pot in Florida(.) period! I love your site :)!
Aw, that’s too bad. Come to California!
OMG .. this looks awesome. Now I need to find something comparable in the Los Angeles region. Wow.
I went to Flaming Spice in Rowland Heights area and really liked it. NO individual pots, but they serve the raw ingredients dim sum style, it’s AYCE, and they actually have some good cooked food too. And they have lots of diff flavors for the broth. https://kirbiecravings.com/2012/02/flaming-spice.html