This Is Framingham

Last night Ethan and I went with our friends to The Melting Pot on route 9 (92 Worcester Rd.).   I love making fondue at home and I’ve made it for these friends at our house before so we were interested to see what this restaurant’s fondue would be like.
We were sat at our booth for 4 , all of the tables are pretty private with high backs and dividers between them, which is nice.  Also all of the tables come with a heating surface that the server operates and adjusts to the type of fondue you are eating.  We decided to go with “the big night out”, a kind of fixed menu but you choose the options.  We didn’t want to over do it and not make it to dessert so our server suggested ordering for three people instead of 4, so we did that and it was plenty, I’d say 4 people could even share it for two people.
We started off with traditional cheese fondue.  Our server, who was very competent and social (but not in a shmoozy way) explained the ingredients he brought to the tables and then started mixing them into the pot. 
 
With the cheese, we were served plates of cubed bread and apples and cut vegetables, all refillable if we ran out.
The cheese was really good, it was a little too thick since we would lose a cube of bread once in a while but it tasted great.

Next came the salads.  We got Asian, California and Mushroom salads.  These were nice to get a little green into the meal.  I ate the mushroom salad which looks a little weird but the dressing was very good and under that pile of thinly sliced mushrooms was nice bed of lettuce so after it’s mixed up a little it looks good.
  

For the meat-cooking fondue, we had some choices between oil that came with a batter or a broth and wine (and something else I forget)  we went with the broth and wine.  Again, our server came to the table with a plate of ingredients (like chives, mushrooms and wine) and explained them as he added them to the pot.  Served with this is a plate of vegetables and meats.  The meats were two types of steak, chicken, shrimp and ahi tuna.  Also serves with this is an assortments of dipping sauces like boursin cheese, teriyaki, curry, cocktail sauce and a few others.

This was pretty good, although I think if you were to skip any part of the meal it might be this just because the cheese is so good and then later you can’t go wrong with dipping things in chocolate so if you had to pick, those two would be the way to go.
For dessert we got the “Ying-Yang”, which is half white and half dark chocolate, this is prepared in the kitchen and then brought out to the table.  With this we were served a plate of cheesecake, strawberries, pineapple, graham cracker and oreo crusted marshmallows, bananas and brownies.  These were all “refillable” too.  This fondue was really good, like I said you can’t go wrong with dipping things in chocolate so I wasn’t surprised that we all enjoyed it.
 
The only downside is that it’s very expensive, so I’ll stick to making fondue at home but I’m glad we tried it and we had a great time, we sat down at 6:45 and left a little after 10:00.  Our server, Patrick was excellent, he would come by and ask us if we needed any more vegetables or anything and his timing was great all night.   That, in addition to him being a nice person, really made our experience there very pleasant. 
I would recommend the Melting Pot, if you have some money to burn and want to try something different.