By Elena Kadvany
E-mail Elena Kadvany
About this blog: I am a perpetually hungry twenty-something journalist, born and raised in Menlo Park and currently working at the Palo Alto Weekly as education and youth staff writer. I graduated from USC with a major in Spanish and a minor in jo...
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About this blog: I am a perpetually hungry twenty-something journalist, born and raised in Menlo Park and currently working at the Palo Alto Weekly as education and youth staff writer. I graduated from USC with a major in Spanish and a minor in journalism. Though my first love is journalism, food is a close second. I am constantly on the lookout for new restaurants to try, building an ever-expanding "to eat" list. As a journalist, I'm always trolling news sources and social media websites with an eye for local food news, from restaurant openings and closings to emerging food trends. When I was a teenager growing up in Menlo Park, I always drove up to the city on weekends with the singular purpose of finding a better meal than I could at home. But in the past year or so, the Peninsula's food culture has been totally transformed, with many new restaurants opening and a continuous stream of San Francisco restaurants coming south to open Peninsula outposts. Don't navigate this food boom hungry and alone! Feed me your tips on new chefs and eats and together we'll share them with the broader community.
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The corner of Castro Street and Evelyn Avenue in downtown Mountain View has been brought back to life with the opening of Little Sheep Mongolian Hot Pot, a large international chain with several Bay Area locations.
The new restaurant took over 102 Castro St. soon after Hunan Chili closed in 2013, but just opened its doors in late November.
Little Sheep Mongolian Hot Pot, one of the newest additions to the downtown Mountain View dining scene.
Pass by on a cold night and you’ll get the gist of the hot-pot concept: the windows stream up from
large metal pots full of hot broth sitting at the center of tables, with plates of raw add-ins like vegetables, meats, seafood and noodles brought to diners, who then cook the soup to their personal content.
Little Sheep's soup bases are prepared from a "secret" recipe with up to 36 different herbs and spices, according to the restaurant’s website. For the soup base, you can choose from spicy, original or half and half. Then, take your pick of endless meats — from angus and kobe beef to beef tendon balls and pork belly — or seafood (mussels, clams, scallops, cuttlefish balls, shrimp, calamari). Vegetable, noodle and other add-in options are equally endless. Finish with sauces, which vary from location to location. Explore the full menu
here.
Other Little Sheep Mongolian Hot Pot locations nearby include San Mateo, Union City, Cupertino and San Francisco. Farther-flung outposts are in China, Japan and even Canada.
The Mountain View restaurant is open daily from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. and 5:30-10 p.m.