Review: The Melting Pot

After a recent media blitz and glowing reviews on The Phantom Gourmet, The Melting Pot seemed a wonderfully different choice for a dinner with good friends. Fondue - it's trendy, it's certainly different, and it could be fun; at least that's what we thought.

The service was abysmal. Considering you are cooking your own food, the wait staff could drop by once in a while to see if you needed anything, perhaps an extra fork or possibly a refill on your drink. Maybe your cook top wasn't hot enough to handle the amount of food you were trying to cook at one time. As if it wasn't enough to be ignored by one waitress we apparently had two waitresses that looked similar to each other and they visibly fought over who was running our table. I have news for both of them; no one was running our table. Every time we ordered that person would disappear and someone else would appear a few minutes later with the items. Then they would shuffle again for the next course.

We started with a cheese course. That's when we realized we were going to have a problem. We were four people with different taste preferences and only one cooking station at our table. This meant we had to pick one pot and all share. If we wanted cheddar and they wanted Swiss we had to come to some kind of agreement on middle ground. We did, we went with neutrality. The waitress, one of them, arrived with a pot and a tray of ingredients. She threw them in the pot, stirred them around until they were stringy, told us it would take a few more minutes to heat up all the way and left us with a small cup of apple slices and a bowl of bread pieces with an inordinate amount of crumbs heaped in it, as if it was the bottom of a bag of duck food. When we wanted more apple slices and bread for dipping we had to wait for several minutes before we even saw one of our waitresses in our section at another table.

For the meal choice you have a preset group of dishes designed for two to four people. Most include poultry, beef, pork, and fish. Our particular choice had shrimp, chicken, duck, marinated sirloin, peppered pork, and chicken pot stickers. Again you have one warming station in the middle of the table so everyone is going to cook in the same pot. You have to come to a unanimous decision about a flavored broth or hot oil. Consider soup, if you choose a broth that is what you are making. Whatever you flavor the water with is what the items you put in it taste like, no matter what animal or fish persuasion they may be going in they all taste the same when they come out. Also a consideration here is the friend who hated seafood but had to cook his food with the seafood, it all tastes the same after a few minutes in the pot. One of the major problems here is how long it actually takes to cook your meal one or two pieces at a time. They tell you a minute and a half to two minutes for each piece but when you fill up a pot with 8 pieces and metal forks as well as dropping the vegetables in to stay for a while you are dropping the cooking temperature in the pot exponentially. You might think this is leisurely and you won't stuff yourself and while all that is true it will catch up with you in the end because there is a non-publicized time limit to how long you can occupy your table.

The dessert chocolates all sound fantastic as do all of the dipping items, and they are. However, there are too few dipping items for the small pot of chocolate and by the time you are done cooking your meal one piece at a time you barely have time for the chocolate to melt before the hostess, yes the hostess, is dropping the bill on the table. This is your first hint that your non-publicized time limit is up. The second hint is when your waitress comes by and says how was everything while you still have half a plate of marshmallows. The last hint is when they send the bus boy to clean your table despite the fact you are all still sitting there looking at the amount of chocolate left in the bottom of the pan you just got billed $16 for and despite the fact that you have already mentioned to your server that you were considering a second chocolate.

The prices are out in the stratosphere considering you are getting a pot of hot water and several handfuls of raw meat delivered to your table for you to cook. Four people cost $163.00 before the tip that was one pot of cheese, two platters for two of meat, and one small chocolate for dessert. My tips for you: if you go, opt for the cheese course and the chocolate course. By skipping the "make your own soup" course you will be able to thoroughly enjoy these much more appealing items and still be able to get out before your time is up and the staff gives you the bum's rush to vacate the booth.

Quite honestly the four of us will never go back, not even for cheese and chocolate. We can and have done better fondue at home, and the service was much better too.