Tao‘s HotPot & Shabu

"Enjoyed a meal here on a rainy day. It was great! Clean, friendly, well-lit, and delicious. What they lack in the amount of different items they make up for in quality and portions. Personally, I prefer a few heaping portions of high quality items over countless standard sized portions of sub par items any time. It is all you can eat but it's not buffet style, which I definitely appreciated. I'm looking forward to bringing my mom and sisters here next time."

"I love the food. I had the mushroom broth. Delish. Then we had meat, fish, squid, mussels. All is very fresh and high quality. The vegetables are fresh and clean. The service is fast and friendly."

"Not sure if anyone has been hoping for a hot pot/shabu place to open up around here, but I was and I’m glad Tao’s Hot Pot and Shabu opened up in Folsom! If you have never tried this type of food, you pick from a selection of soup bases, then pick your meats/veggies/carbs etc., boil then eat. Basically fondue but not using cheese. They also offer hot food items, such as chicken wings, potstickers, etc. If you can handle spicy then I would recommend trying the spicy soup base, unfortunately I can’t handle heat. The owner is from the hot pot capital of China (ChongQing) so I would imagine the spicy soup base to be quite good. Price is comparable to other ayce hot pot/shabu places, and there are lots of specials during the week (50% off alcohol and free soft drink), I also did the lobster tail add on ($12), so worth it! You can tell it’s really fresh and it was tasty. For my protein I just stuck to beef, both kinds were really good. I got the miso soup base and it was well flavored and seasoned. I’m a big fan of their house special dipping sauce, and stuck to using that. The homemade shrimp balls is also great, and a must order. The shrimp came peeled and deveined, which was nice. To my pleasant surprise they offer yuki no bosha (cabin in the snow) sake. A rarer delicious sake I usually find at fancier establishments. At 50% I just had to haha! I’ll be back to try the tomato soup base soon! They do get busy on the weekends so plan ahead. This would be great for those heading to/from Tahoe as well. Nom nom!"

"We came here with my parents who live nearby, we were excited that a hot pot place finally opened locally and we didn’t have to drive all the way to Sacramento. Unfortunately the entire experience was extremely uneven and unless major improvements can be made. First of all the menu & the ordering process. The menu is All You Can Eat with restrictions. You can order up to 3 meats at a time and select other items for 90 minutes. This would be fine expect 1. Each order came with 5 pieces of meat while we had 4 people… you don’t have to be a genius to do the math on how little meat that is per round. The quality is very good I will give it that. 2. Service was EXTREMELY slow, we waited a whole 30 min from ordering to our first round of items. If each round took 30 min we will still be starving by the time we leave 3. The menu is very limited compared to most hot pot places and each portion was so small. The owner was very apologetic about the situation as we weren’t the only frustrated table in the restaurant. It was a busy night and many people had issues with their orders. I understand it’s also the owners first restaurant so of course there’s a learning curve. A few pieces of advice 1. Have a serve yourself sauce bar, there’s a reason why most hot pot restaurants do this. This has been a tried and true model, it reduces the time staff has to attend to your guests (especially helpful if you’re short staffed). It gives the guests something to do, so they’re not sitting around wondering why their food is taking so long. 2. Make your staff specialize in tasks, have someone just fill water for example. The entire time we ate there no one refilled our waters even after asking. 3. Have a better ordering system. There’s not enough variety on the menu for such a restrictive ordering system. Either add more variety or increase the amount of food per order. I hope this place improves and succeeds! It has the right elements and just needs operational fixes."