THE PLACE:Admittedly Sunny doesn’t look like much, but in out minds all the best places to eat concentrate on ingredients rather than furniture (naïve, we know). Being as busy as this – and full of Chinese people – at lunch is a very good sign but we’re here for something special we saw one night when we picked up a standard takeaway.

THE MEAL:The menu is full of the usual stuff you’d expect but we shun it for what we found out is called the hot pot buffet. We settle in excitedly and a hotplate is brought out. Once that is warmed up a massive vat of soup is delivered to the table followed by two trays of raw ingredients. The idea is the soup boils, you add in beef, prawns, tofu, potato, crab sticks, squid, mushrooms and more, and watch it cook before fishing it out and ramming it down your throat. Repeat as many times as you like cos it’s All You Can Eat (and drink) for £20 each. The whole thing is a great deal of fun, and everything cooks in an instant. One half of the soup has about 50 chillies in it – quite a kick for the average western palate – while the other is soothing chicken-esque broth. The best bet is to dive between the two cooking as you go.

THE VERDICT: It’s not often you can say that you’ve eaten a meal that’s nothing like anything you’ve eaten before but that’s exactly what happened at Sunny. Although essentially soup, the experience of cooking the raw ingredients made it so much more interesting. The idea that you’re controlling your meal turned out to be kind of the opposite – it was more of an adventure into the unknown. And all you can eat and drink for £20 – well, you can’t ague with that when it’s all fresh. We’ll be back one evening when we can really take our time over things.

WERE WE SUSSED? No – you’d be slightly odd not to want to take a photo of this meal. No suspicion aroused at all.

SUNNY
Queens Rd
(01273) 2008 866
11AM – 2.30PM & 5PM – 11PM EVERY DAY