Two new restaurants to the Princess Cruises fleet give you the opportunity to watch your food being cooked in front of you. Teppanyaki, a group shared table hibachi concept and Hot Pot, a cook your own meal in huge pots of broth at the table, share one restaurant space on the Sun Princess but require separate reservations. It can make for a very loud experience so if possible, time your Hot Pot visits so they don't line up with the specific Teppanyaki showtimes of 5PM and 7PM. We ate around 6PM and it was a good balance of watching the festivities and having some peace and quiet to talk to each other.
If you've ever dined in a Teppanyaki or hibachi style restaurant in the past, you'd find some of the presentation to be repetitive but still a fun time. You get a well balanced meal of Asian flavors that even the pickiest eater will enjoy. The only option for this specialty dining is a shared table so you will be seated with strangers. They do accomodate for food allergies and dietary restrictions. At our table, one person was allergic to seafood so they cooked everything but the shrimp and scallops protein options on the shared grill surface so our table mate could be served their food before any seafood touched the cooking surface.
Everyone starts with a serving of edamame and miso soup.
Then the hibachi chef gets the show started singing songs and cracking jokes along with the eggs.
We both chose the Tonkatsu starter - panko crusted pork, bbq katsu sauce, and shredded cabbage.
While we enjoyed our starters that had been prepared in the back kitchen, our chef prepared the vegetables and scrambled eggs that would be added to everyone's fried rice.
With the fried rice finished and gathered to one side in a giant heart shape, our chef moved on to making little volcano towers (sans open flame) out of grilled onions, carrots, and zucchini slices.
Chicken and steak protein choices hit the grill first. You could choose two meat proteins with a good mix of options including steak, chicken, salmon, shrimp, and tofu. You could specify the doneness of your meat as well.
After giving everyone a chance to catch a piece of cooked chicken flung at them, my first choice of Teriyaki Chicken was cut up and plated. We all were given a tray of three dipping sauces to use with all of our meal as desired. The chef tried three times to let me catch a piece of chicken in my mouth but all three pieces ended up falling into my cleavage. Pro tip - don't wear a v-neck blouse to Teppanyaki or find a way to grow a few extra inches taller before dinner.
Now that we could safely cook seafood without contaminating the grill, the salmon, scallops, and shrimp were next to be cooked on the grill.
Cooked scallops
For dessert, we both chose the Mochi ice cream. Even the servers joked about how frozen solid this Mochi ice cream was when it was brought out. One of our tablemates bit the bullet so to speak and stuffed the entire ball of ice cream in her mouth to let soften but the bulk of us just made attempts to scrape bits off like a cup of Italian ice.
For our Hot Pot dinner, we ended up being seated at a table meant for larger groups. There were two heating elements set into this table which meant we couldn't easily extend our legs out in front of us. Good thing I'm double jointed!
Over each of these tables was a heating vent built into a hanging light fixture so the smoke from your pot rises up toward these vents.
Rather than a hot stone or griddle that most cook your own food places use, Hot Pot offers a variety of meat, seafood, and vegetables that are cooked in broth. They have a special stock pot with a barrier in the middle so it can hold your choice of two broth flavors. Our waiters advised that the most common choices are Princess Miso and the Kaffir Lime and Lemongrass. The other option is is a Classic Tomato broth so I can see why most people choose the two most alike options.
Then once you have chosen what you want to cook in the broths, trays of the items are brought to your table to add as you wish. The waiters do give you instructions about cooking such as waiting for the broths to come to a boil, potentially designating one broth to be for meat and one for seafood, and for how long to cook each type of protein. They also brought out your choice of rice and/or noodles. The waiters will bring as many trays of the protein as you want. Easy to switch things up if you decide you'd rather have twice as much meat than seafood.
They bring you out a couple trays of dipping sauces (some spicy) and a tray of garnishes. The tableware is mostly small plates and bowls encouraging lots of small bites.
For the Platters section, I chose the Seafood option which normally has white shrimp, scallops, calamari, black mussels, whole clams, and salmon. I asked to make it only shrimp, scallops, and calamari and they happily obliged.
Dad chose the Meat option which normally has pork belly, chicken breast, and beef striploin. For an extra $15 you can upgrade to the Premium Wagyu Beef Sampler. Dad chose to do the upgrade but we never saw the extra charge added.
These cuts of protein are intentionally cut thin so that they cook up quickly. We used my phone to set a timer for each time we filled the pots.
No that's not a bowl of snakes but rather a bowl of wide soft noodles that was suggested as a base for the meat.
Our chicken and vegetable sides:
Cooking away:
My first round of cooked seafood over the noodles:
Next we tried the cooked beef over the noodles:
Lastly the cooked chicken over the noodles:
Proof that we really did use the veggies as well:
The dessert options for Hot Pot are the same as Teppanyaki. Our server really pushed for us to get the mochi ice cream again joking that they'd let it thaw out better this time. We decided we were just too full for dessert tonight.
