By Kiana Koh

Do you enjoy hot pot? What about barbecues? If you love both, you’d love Mookata. Mookata is a combination of both a hotpot and barbecue. It’s a match made in heaven for fussy eaters because you get the best of both worlds!

Mookatas has been gaining popularity in Singapore now, because of how affordable it is, and just the overall satisfaction of being able to cook and enjoy your own food. You can cook it however you like it and no one can say anything!

There’s a stall at West Coast, The Smookata, that has quite a lot of customers despite it being new. I went down to try it with my family just to see what the hype is about.

The Smookata is located at a hawker centre, which is pretty accessible by walking or if you are driving the car park is in front of the hawker centre.

It is open from 5pm in the evening all the way till 3am, so it’s a perfect way to end the night by having some great and cheap food!

The menu is pretty simple, you can choose between a platter for 2 pax, or a platter for 4 pax. If you want to add on certain premium ingredients, you’re able to do so by checking off the items you want in a list that they’ll provide.

The platter for 2 pax costs SGD 22 and the platter for 4 costs SGD 39, which is affordable for a steamboat and barbecue meal that consists of many ingredients! Do take note that for ingredients you want to add on, you’d have to pay a small amount! With that in mind, do try out their Thai Milk Tea as well, it is slightly on the sweeter side but just request more ice or add a little bit more water and you are good to go!

My family got the platter for 4 pax. There was a total of 7 of us but the platter actually was just enough for us!

So this is how the grill looks like, it’s in a circular shape with the smaller circle in the middle for you to grill your food, and the shallow outer ring for your choice of soup.

We were given a small plate of pork lard and the reason for it is to check if the grill is hot enough to cook our ingredients! Also, the oil that comes out of the pork lard helps the ingredients that we cook later on to not stick to the grill.

There’s a white jug behind the grill and that is actually the soup base, and you get one whole jug filled with it! So whenever you feel like there is not enough soup, you can just pour it in.

So here are all the ingredients that came with the platter, there are prawns, vegetables, hotdogs, crab meat and much more. You really do get a lot for what you’re paying for!

Mookata is definitely the way to go if you’re unsure of what you want to eat and if you want it to be more affordable, especially if you’re going with a big group of friends!

So if you’re in the West Coast area of Singapore, do give The Smookata a try, you will not regret it!