Ting Yuan Fish Head Hotpot, Liang Seah Street

I'm starting to get sick of all this hotpot. This entire street is filled with these places, but apparently on a "lower tier" to cater towards starving students with their all-you-can eat food. It's cheaper, but it shows in the ingredients - poorer quality meat, inconvenient condiment selections, poor quality hastily-made dumplings, lack of air conditioning, etc. The only thing this place has going for it is the milky white broth, brewed from chicken bones. It does give it more body, but it still lacks in taste, if you know what I mean.

Interestingly, it turns out that this place (22 Liang Seah Street) is actually part of Chuan Restaurant on Purvis Street, which is a much more upscale Sichuan place with a great and very authentic "water boiled fish." These two seem so unlike each other though that I wrongly accused the hotpot place of stealing napkins from Chuan.

Yuck. I don't want to come back to this street. I'd prefer to stick to the better ones in Chinatown. Or, even better, just wait to go to Taiwan, where they actually have the critical sa-cha sauce.