HJH Restaurant

The inside of the restaurant appeared fairly nice and bright. The waitress only spoke Mandarin, thankfully I can understand Mandarin, but can’t speak fluently.
We came here for lunch and saw a limited menu on the table with a few items. Super hungry, we decided to get a noodles (chicken thigh) and dumplings. The lady came out twice as she asked us if minor modifications to what we intended to order was alright. The food took quite some time to come and we weren’t given any tea either until we asked a couple times and were nearly finished our meal.
Another interesting thing, when she put down our food, we were given no cutlery or bowls and went back into the kitchen for a couple minutes. I really didn’t appreciate staring with wide hungry eyes at my food unable to eat it.
The food itself was decent, mediocre.

So this place specialized in hot pot/​stew like Chinese version of dakgalbi (what you get at joons). Other than the stew HJH also serve dumplings and few choices of noodle and some typical side dishes like shredded potato.
There are many ingredients to choose from for the stew, seafood, beef, chicken, vegetables, etc. Once the ingredients are chosen the server layered all the raw ingredients in the pot with garlics, onions, sweet potatoes and some dry dates. After 10 – 15 mins of cooking, the rest of the ingredients like cabbage, tofu, konjac noodle are added in as well as some thick sauce. The sauce tastes like one of the Lee Kum Kee sauces to me. After another few minutes the ingredients are mixed well and topped with cilantro.
It was a new experience to me, but tasted just like some Asian stir fry or stew, but instead of bringing it to your table ready to be served, the dish is cooked in front of you. The stew tasted good, but nothing out of the ordinary. Because one of us can’t handle spicy food we didn’t add any chili peppers in it, it would’ve tasted better if the dish was spicy. Kinda wish I could put some gochujang in the stew haha. I personally liked the sweet potatoes and frozen tofu in the stew the most.
We also tried some dumplings and fried pork buns. The buns were pretty good, but the dumpling fillings were very salty and had a strong taste of alcohol, it is common to marinate meat with cooking alcohol/​rice wine in northern China.
Service was great! The servers were very friendly and attentive. I also agree that the menu doesn’t have enough English description. I would suggest to bring a friend who understands mandarin or northern Chinese food with you if you really want to try out the stew. I understand mandarin, so it wasn’t a problem for me and my fam, but to non mandarin speakers this might be a problem.
³⁄₅ food
⁴⁄₅ service
Price:/? I didn’t pay for it lol. We had the stew with 6 or 7 ingredients + 20 dumplings +10 pork buns (bite size!) + $ 15off coupon it came up to $ 60(I overheard it), there were 5 people in our group, so not bad

I’ll give it a 2. I’ve definitely had better.
They have a minimal English menu, but what English the have on their menu is confusing. The majority of the menu is in Chinese. To my knowledge (I don’t read Chinese), they specialize in something akin to Northern Chinese style hot pot, but one has to order each item for said hot pot individually. That being said, some of the items I saw in English said, and no soup bases or sauces were mentioned in English, «basa fillet», «shrimp», «chicken wings», etc. I’m not sure what the price point per item was either.
We weren’t interested in hot pot, not having enough time, but we had seen outside that they had noodles and dumplings, which are not on their actual menu. We had to ask them for that menu. We got «noodles in sauce — $ 7.99» and Chinese fried pork buns — $ 5.50 for 10. Talk about vague. The noodles in sauce ended up being broad noodles in a broth that tasted of cinnamon, soy sauce, brown vinegar and chili oil. This was topped with chunks of carrots, potatoes, celery, wood ear fungus, dried tofu and a minute amount of minced pork. For $ 7.99, I certainly expected more. The Chinese fried pork buns were a disappointment. A month ago, while in Shanghai, I was having the most incredible Chinese fried buns of my life. Those were the size of a typical steamed bun and were incredibly crisp on the outside, and squirted juice when bit into. These were about the size of a steamed soup bun, were slightly burnt on the bottom, the wrap was hard (not even chewy. Hard.) and had next to no liquid in them. They were not dry, just disappointing. Their most redeeming quality was that each bun had a sprinkle of black sesame seeds and a few slivers of green onions on them as garnish. At least that was pleasant to look at.
The table we were at was sticky. That was gross.
Unless you speak fluent Mandarin, and ideally can read Chinese as well, I don’t suggest you come here. The servers seem to only speak Mandarin and they are quite impatient when you don’t speak Mandarin and you ask questions about their vague menu items.
I came once. That was enough for me. I won’t be coming again.

1.5 Star
HJH, I am not sure what they serving?
Northern Comfort Food?
Some kind of Braised Chicken 焖雞？
The interior exactly the way it was as its previous restaurant Yummy Vietnamese.
I ordered the Chicken with Noodle ($ 7.49) and ended up getting Basa Fish Filet with Noodle ($ 7.49) 焖龍利柳面. Maybe I really needed to practice my Mandarin more…
But I still don’t know why there are piece of chicken with the fish. Ok I was confused… everything has this similar strange colour.
So how was my noodle? Interesting sweet, salty, sour and with a hint of spiciness. Not bad but everything here is just too homey for me including the service and vibe… and doesn’t feels like my own home…
FYI: A small cup of Soya Bean Drink for $ 1.50 makes Starbucks Coffee a bargain…