Nice to Meet You Skewer Hot Pot
Sichuan/Chengdu-style hot pot restaurant simplifies its pricing to rival Irvine competitors
On our first (and so far only) visit to Nice to Meet You Skewer Hot Pot, we saw a lot of potential in this Chengdu/Sichuan-style hot pot restaurant, which replaced Three Roots Mexican Cocina (relocated 2021) and Happy Lamb Hot Pot (closed 2020) in Irvine’s Culver Plaza. Neighboring Meizhou Dongpo, this space features a prominent wall of refrigerators containing skewers, bowls, and stacked trays of meat, fish, noodles, and vegetables, and a small salad bar offering cold items in addition to mixable oils, pastes, and sauces. Most of the items were and are self-service, though servers take orders for your choice of flavored broths to fill two halves of a circular hot pot, and additional plates of meat to cook.
The challenge here was Nice to Meet You’s original business model, which used confusing a la carte pricing: Every self-serve bowl and tray was color coded, and the colors were supposed to represent prices, but didn’t make a lot of sense. Skewered means and fish were sold individually and appeared to be affordable, but some of the (universally tiny) items are sold with two or three skewers jammed inside. Even the salad bar carried a surprising upcharge.
Now, that overcomplexity has been dropped in favor of an all-you-can-eat pricing system that’s a lot easier to understand. Lunch is $28 per person on weekdays, with dinners and weekend lunches priced at $36. Each table can choose from three separate soup flavors out of a total of nine options, and still access the same collection of meats, veggies, noodles, and other items that were available before. Though most of the ingredients are pretty much as expected, we loved the collection of flavors and variety here, and found the tofu bags with shrimp paste inside to be an unexpected delight.
Now that Nice to Meet You has its pricing straightened out, we would certainly come back for another visit. That said, there are now quite a few “boil your meal” restaurants in the immediate vicinity, though the skewers and Sichuan/Chengdu focus differentiate it from nearby All That Shabu, which has slightly higher prices (and a Korean buffet as an offset).
Stats
Price: $$
Service: Buffet
Open Since: 2022
Addresses
15361 Culver Dr.
Irvine, CA 92604
949.340.6618
Instagram: @nicetomeetyouhotpot