Ming Court, Sky City

Herald rating: **1/2

At Ming Court, Sky City, the steamboat comes with a little laminated card headed: Steamboat DIY Instructions.

1: Choose your steamboat set menu and your flavour of soup base.

Of course we hadn't bothered to read this, so when the waitress said: "Spicy, sour or water," we looked blank. You could tell from the look on her face that she just knew we were going to stuff up the entire thing, and so it proved.

We finally figured out the soup business, which meant that we got a big pan, divided in half, with spicy soup in one half and the "water", which is clear broth, in the other. They bring a nifty one-ring gas cooker to your table and put the soup on the burner. Then they start bringing plates of food. They keep doing this until you want to run shrieking from the room.

At the end you are supposed to end up with two lots of soup, flavoured with all of the bits you have chucked in over the evening. This is a very odd way of eating because you end up with a soup (or two soups) that taste like rather pongy mud. Or ours did - and we only put in about three bits of tripe. In any case, we were never given spoons with which to eat the soup - you fish your bits out with ladles with holes in the bottom. Perhaps they knew what a mess we'd made and thought they'd save us the humiliation of having to slurp it.

I advise you to read the card. Although the card is lacking in some quite important regards.

Instruction 1, for instance, should read: On no account go to steamboat with three other incredibly bossy, not to mention silly, individuals. Trouble will ensue.

We started with remarkable restraint. The Pretty One (she is so bossy she bossed me into calling her this) threw a few prawns in the spicy broth. We waited for them to cook. Then we ate them. She ate a whole octopus. She said she couldn't really see the point. She said this a lot. She said it about the tripe, and she wasn't even going to bother cooking our eggs because she really couldn't see the point in that at all. Anyone would have thought she was the boss of the table, whereas everyone should have known that I was.

Nobody did. They all just demanded something and then that was thrown in. Then they forgot to fish it out because they were too busy talking nonsense.

The maitre d' said that steamboat was very good because you could have a good talk while the food was cooking.

"But we've fallen out and we're not speaking," I said. She didn't have any suggestions.

I had a look around the room, which is on a mezzanine above the lobby at the casino. It is faux industrial meets vaguely Asian (bonsai tree, ceramics) and there is a margarine dragon that has been proudly exhibited - for five months. There is a bit of dust on it and a sign which says: Display only. There are some of those little buried army ornaments exactly like the ones the Television Critic picked up in China. I hope they didn't get ripped off too.

You get very good service. Or we did. At some stage a man approached our table with more food and said: "Oh. Chicken." What this meant was that we should have put the chicken in first. See 3: Add a selection of your set menu items remembering to add chicken first.

But we hadn't been given the chicken first. And we had been told at the outset: The only rule is no rules.

So, righto, I flung some noodles in. We were later told that you should not put the noodles in until the end because they will take over.

"The Kracken wakes," said the Television Critic, who is of a melodramatic bent, which is possibly why he was pretending he eats tripe.

The maitre d' came over to see how we were going. I asked her if she'd been told we were stuffing up the whole thing and she grinned and said she had not "exactly" been told this.

The Arts Editor, the classy one, was busy stuffing steak into her handbag to take home for the cat. The Pretty One took some salmon for the cat next door. They left me the octopus for our cat. He doesn't eat octopus.

This is what we were offered: salmon, crab-sticks, meat-balls, fish-balls, tripe, octopus, beef, lamb, eggs, spinach, cabbage, mushrooms, prawns, mussels, salmon, chicken, and I think that's all. We ate about a third of it.

Our experience was more DIY than cooking and everyone knows what New Zealanders are like at DIY - useless.

There are nice ways to cook octopus, beef and so on, probably even tripe. But when you think about it, which I obviously wasn't when I said we were having steamboat, boiling stuff isn't the best way to cook any of it. But I don't think there are really any nice ways to cook those processed-looking balls of unidentified things, or that ghastly surimi stuff which I don't regard as a food form.

Address: Sky City
Phone: 363 6000
The food: Chinese. There are $25- or $35-a-head steamboat options (until July 3).
Wine: Limited and rather dull selection by the glass and bottle.
Parking: Lots in the parking building below.
Bottom line: Ming Court offers a heap (well, many heaps) of food and good service but the food is all a bit lacklustre and processed.