Morals Village
3987 Riverside Dr., 613-736-6503, cqdz.ca
Open: daily from 11:30 a.m. to 11 p.m.
Prices: soup bases $2.50 to $8, weekdays all-you-can-eat $25.99, $19.95 for seniors over 65, $13.95 for children under 13, weekends add $2
Access: no steps to front door or washroom
In the south-western Chinese megacity of Chongqing, there are reportedly more than 50,000 hot-pot restaurants — or roughly one for every 600 people within its population of 30 million, in case you’re counting.
In Ottawa, we have just three restaurants specializing in Chongqing hot pot (also called Sichuan hot pot, since Chongqing until 1997 was part of Sichuan province, and perhaps descended from Mongolian hot pot, because the Mongols, some say, were China’s first hot-pot enthusiasts).
I’ve not been able to visit the three main hot-pot eateries — that many hot-pot meals in close succession might have been too much food and too many chilies for me. But for now, I can say that Morals Village, the largest, newest and most expensive of Ottawa’s hot-pot options, provided a sumptuous, spicy, all-you-can-eat, evening out.
Launched last fall in the mall at Riverside Drive and Hunt Club Road that’s also home to Ottawa’s T & T Asian supermarket, Morals Village is part of a six-location chain in Canada, just as its major hot-pot rivals on Merivale Road, Liuyishou Hotpot and Little Sheep, are franchise and chain operations respectively.
Seating almost 170 people, Morals Village is a sleek, well-lit, comfortable place of red and gold, with large abstract murals along the back wall. For a first-timer, there’s a lot to take in, from the dizzyingly extensive menu to do-it-yourself cooking over individual induction cooktops embedded into tables, to the array of dipping-sauce ingredients at the sauce station. Fortunately, the routine becomes clear pretty quickly, especially because the restaurant, as on the busy Friday night when I visited, can be filled with attentive servers assisting customers.
The foundation for hot-pot meals is the soup base that goes in the pot. At Morals Village, there are more than 10 of them, from four signature spicy ones to mushroom, corn, herbal and tomato soup bases for those who like it tepid. Rather than limit yourself to a single soup base, you can pay a bit more for a pot that accommodates two soup bases. I tried the medium original spicy soup base and found it added plenty of kick to ingredients without being debilitating, as well as the mushroom soup base, which I thought was a pleasant, savoury counterpoint.
At Morals Village, diners pay for their choice of soup base (between $2.50 and $8) and then pay a flat fee for all-you-can-eat items to dunk in their bubbling hot pots. The buffet costs $26.99 for adults, $19.95 for seniors and $13.95 for children under 13, with an extra $2 added on weekends and holidays, such as the upcoming Chinese New Year.
So, you do best to come very hungry and willing to allocate some time — the maximum is two hours, according to the restaurant’s rules — to eat your money’s worth. On the Friday night I went, there seemed to be plenty of young Asian couples out on dates.
After choosing your soup base, it’s time to choose ingredients. The illustrated Morals Village menu lists pages and pages of them, from thin slices of meat, which arrive at tables in partially frozen curls, to leafy vegetables, mushrooms, seafoods including shrimp, squid and mock crab, wontons, dumplings, tofu products, and an assortment of noodles. For homesick Chinese and other adventurous eaters, offal, including beef tongue, tripe, duck giblets and pork blood tofu will appeal. For splurgers, there are luxury items that come at extra cost, such as slices of wagyu short rib ($35) or kagoshima pork ($7) and Alaskan snow crab legs ($19 for eight pieces).
Morals Village restaurant in Ottawa Monday Feb 12, 2018. Tony Caldwell
Once those items have been ordered, it’s time to mix up a dipping sauce. The station in the centre of the dining room is filled with ingredients, plus a card that lists several recipes. I went with a Beijing-style blend of thick, sludgy sesame paste, garlic and green onions, which was tasty, but also filling in its own right, countering a glutton’s efforts to maximize input from the buffet.
Before we began hot-potting, we had appetizers — crisp but room-temperature vegetarian spring rolls from the dipping-sauce station plus an crispy Sichuan pork, whose breaded meaty morsels were noticeably dosed with floral, lip-tingling Sichuan pepper.
Then, our ingredients arrived, eventually blanketing our table, and we dialled up our induction burners so the hot pots simmered. In went the meats, which turned colour and were ready to eat in seconds. Shrimp dumplings took longer. The spicy soup base, larded with chilies, chili oil, garlic and green onions, brought its own kind of heat to the hot pot, although I know a spicy-food maniac who would have liked it spicier.
Ingredients cook in a hot pot at Morals Village restaurant in Ottawa
We also tried the wagyu short rib to see what the fuss and expense was about. The meat was richly marbled, super-tender and full of flavour, but I wouldn’t call it a must-order, given so many all-you-can treats available.
My dining companion, who has eaten enough hot pot in Chongqing to go out on a limb, tried the purplish blocks of pork blood tofu. “I didn’t let it cook enough. It’s cold in the middle,” he said. “It’s definitely an acquired taste. It tastes like iron. The texture is very nice.”
With the sole exception of “Japanese crab meat,” that was in fact pollock, every ingredient we tried was top-notch and fresh. The only gaffe was an order of cheese-stuffed meatballs brought instead of lamb meatballs. Also, the kitchen was out of lamb skewers.
The restaurant is not licensed, which struck my friend as odd since beer went so well with his hot-pot meals in China. At Morals Village, a large bar dispenses fruity drinks featuring pear, strawberry and sour plum, for example, and those dotted many a table. For sweet desserts, there were mini-buns dipped in condensed milk and cones of soft-serve ice cream.
My friend further contrasted his Chongqing hot-pot dinners with his visit to Morals Village. He fondly recalled eating at much smaller hot-pot places, sometimes outside in the swelter of summer, ordering from similarly extensive, if less luxurious, menus, and cooking food in bigger, communal hot pots. There were fewer soup bases — perhaps just very spicy, not spicy, and herbal options.
He gave Morals Village very high marks, as did I, although I had nothing to compare it to. We both look forward to return visits, and to giving Ottawa’s other hot-pot options a go.
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