The One Spot Soup House (湯.com)

Clay pot rice is one of my favourite Hong Kong style comfort foods.  Essentially it's just rice and toppings cooked in a personal size clay pot.  Besides the fact that the rice is flavoured from the toppings, cooking each individual portion in a clay pot results in a layer of crunchy and crispy rice at the bottom.  Locally, I didn't know many places that specialized in clay pot rice, just James' Snack.  It wasn't until Kevin invited me to dinner that night that I knew The One Spot Soup House even existed. 

The store is very small, fitting less than 20 people.  Although it was a Wednesday, the place was full at dinner time.  Also, just throwing this out there, but I have no idea why the Chinese name is 湯.com.  I typed "湯.com" into the search bar and got to some Japanese site.  Just sayin'.

Every clay pot rice comes with a little snack and soup to entertain you from the long wait.  I don't really know what the soup was, but it wasn't that great.  (I think it may have been lotus root soup.) They offer a lot of soups that are double-boiled -- most of them are $4.95 to $5.95 which really isn't that expensive considering double-boiled soups at Chinese restaurants are pretty expensive.

The pork rib topping ($6.50) was quite popular.  I'm not sure what sauce they ordered it with (there's the option of black bean, garlic, or satay) since I didn't get to try it, but I'm thinking it was the garlic.

My pork jowl with sausage ($7.50) was pretty good.  This one is more expensive because sausage is $1 extra.  The sausage was super salty even though it was so thinly sliced.  It was good with rice though.  I liked the pork jowl since it was quite tender.

On another visit, we got the sliced beef with egg ($6.95).  The beef here was actually not that overly tenderized using baking soda -- just a bit.  Still, I didn't really like it so much because of that.  I'm not a fan of hardboiled eggs, which this is not, but the yolk was not runny so it was just alright for me -- not amazing.

Being a bit curious, we also got the oyster and Japanese style sauce ($7.25), which was really just a lot of oysters and canned (and overly salty) mushroom slices on clay pot rice topped with mayo.  At first it was not bad, but as the rice cooled down, the oysters got more and more fishy and the texture got really crumbly.

By the end I didn't want to eat the oysters anymore, so I just finished the rice.

That's one of the downsides of having clay pot rice; if it's done correctly, you have to be patience.  But patience is also rewarded with fan jiu (which sounds like "thank you") which is rice that has hardened when touching the clay pot.


Rating: ★★★★
I actually like it a lot despite the bad experience with the oyster rice.  I would probably stick with more conservative things such as pork though.  I am also dying to try their double-boiled soups!



The One Spot Soup House (湯.com)
5857 Victoria Drive
Vancouver, BC
(604) 568-7773