Customize MaLaTang

This is a great place to have casual dining with friends because the ambiance is hip and the food presentation is good.The food presentation is artistic and unique. The pork with brown sugar has a very familiar dish name but the dish is very different from the traditional one. This one is more like fried pork. Dry inside and crispy outside. But the presentation is amazing, just like a fried pork mountain on a platform. The string bean dish on the other hand is very flavorful and freshly prepared.The restaurant deco is interesting with a lot of chic slangs from the Chinese community.The waiter was polite and quick to help me settle in. No other customers dined in when I was there, the restaurant was slow in business. The other restaurant workers chatted on their own. The talk was not work-related and loud. Maybe they forgot they were working.

This place was OK. The format is not super clear if you're a first time customer. The store sign says something else too. We came early for lunch on a Friday, and luckily there was plenty of seating. The restaurant really filled up as we were eating.You tell the employees how many people in your party when you get to the cashier, and they assign your table then. Idk what you would do if you already picked your food and there's no seating. You pick up a large clear tray and go down the line and pick out the ingredient want for your bowl. It's kind of like chipotle style in that way, but at the end you decide in what soup base you would like it cooked in. I think there may have also been a dry pot option, but I don't recall. The way the ingredients are laid out didn't make any sense when we were there. There was meat and seafood scattered around and the veggies and noodles were not sorted either. I think that would have been more helpful, and prevent more cross contamination from fallen things. We had a vegetarian in our group and we have to look out for stuff like that. I for sure would not recommend if there's any sort of allergies. Also as we were early, not all the options were out yet, so some of the things come out later and you don't have those options. We had four people in our group and all got different broths. Every single one was soo soo salty. OK maybe if you're taking it to go and are willing to dilute your soup at home, but we were eating in. I didn't finish my food and didn't take my leftovers.Unless you're very conscious of how much is in your bowl and how much it weighs, the cost goes up very quickly. For an average size portion, I paid almost 30 for a mediocre meal. My coworker tells me that the soup usually isn't that salty and she's had good times here in the past, but I'm not sure I would come back.

The food was a visual experience!! The ambiance chic! And the service fast! Loved this place , the food, the friends and will definitely recommend!

Nice viby place with good food and fast service. They do have plenty stuff to pick from. Food is well seasoned and good size portions. Liked their soy fried rice.

I think you'll have a pretty good experience here, but you'll need to understand a few things. The Service is generally good, more so surface-level good. What I mean by that is that the servers will talk to you, help you out, and are generally very polite. But the tables are very sticky and you can catch a few things, detail wise, that show up and make you think the attention to detail isn't there. With respect to the food, way too salty. That said, my wife thought it was pretty good because that's the way ma la is supposed to taste--salty. However, that's not really my preference. I do personally think that the sauces and broth is overamplified with over saltiness. Overall, not a bad experience. A lot of flavor overload that over shadows most of the food. But it's a fun experience to pluck all of the ingredients you want to see in your ma la soup and broth and make it your own.

Don't know why I drove all the way just to come here. Service was really good don't get me wrong, but the food was not good for what it was worth. They have a very limited malatang bar with very basic items. Not much variety at all. They only had 2 choices of pork bone soup - spicy or non-spicy. The spicy one was way too salty. The server offered to get me a separate bowl of the non-spicy soup to balance out the spiciness and saltiness of the soup, but it tasted super bland. Just tasted like hot water. There was barely any chicken in the sweet and sour pork. Felt like I was just eating super sweet sticky fried batter. Presentation was cool though.

I've been here enough times to confirm the consistency of the quality. I like the MaLaTang offered at this restaurant the most. You pick the items you want included in your MaLa() from a buffet line, your selection is weighed, and they cook it for you. You get to choose 1 of 3 options of how you'd like your MaLa() cooked -- hot pot, stir fry, or something else. You also choose your level of spiciness . I choose 0 spice, but some friends that think they can usually handle mild find level 1 spice to be surprisingly much spicier than what they expect (typically what they consider a 4-5).I love this place since they cook for you, so unlike other hot pot places, there's no chance for you to over-boil your own food. The broth flavor offered here also is savory, and matches my palate. I think some other hot pot places could improve their broth since it's not memorable or anything better than what you make at home.I will continue to go back for the MaLaTang (soup). My friends think this is their best strength on the menu, too. Although the fries look fancy in presentation (they use dry ice in its own bowl and refill the water in the dry ice bowl to continue the show), I found it too greasy but without much flavor or the right crunch to order again.

This is a great place for authentic Chinese food though the prices are a bit high. This pretty much feels like a typical Chinese restaurant in one of those Asian shopping plazas, but this one comes with nice servers that offer great service! You scan a QR code to order any items on their menu but you can also choose to get a customizable bowl of Malatang. You choose a bunch of ingredients and your bowl is then weighed to calculate the price. I think it was about $14 or $15 per pound. There is a good amount of variety for ingredients, but they were missing labels for many options. Also most things here (like instructions for building your bowl) are written in Chinese, so it would be a bit harder to understand what's going on if you didn't read Chinese. The servers are nice enough to explain anything to you if you have questions. Once you weigh your bowl, you can choose between three levels of spice. I chose mild and still found it quite spicy. My bowl came out to be about $18, even though I don't think I got that many ingredients, so I'm not quite sure if the weight of the bowl was deducted from the total weight. The price wasn't exactly the most worth, but everything still tasted great. I ended up packing part of my meal since I was stuffed from trying both my malatang and other menu items. The servers actually pack your to-go box for you which is so nice of them! Overall I'll probably come back if I was really craving something spicy, but I'll explore some other Chinese food options around the area first. Also one thing to note, is that if you go as a group make sure you remember how much your bowl weighed to make it easier to split the bill.

Gem of a spot. Good food, fun atmosphere, very friendly and self-aware server boys.Tong your own ingredients and it's $14.99/lb for three customizabowl (haha see what I did) options:- Malatang (spicy beef bone soup)- Malabang (sweet and spicy peanut sauce)- Dry potI'd recommend the malabang and dry pot for more flavors over just the spicy pain in your mouth.Do order other things off the menu, especially the cumin chicken! You're basically sucking on bones for this dish but the flavors make you appreciate what a beautiful world it is.A bit pricey. Would come back if I find a sugar-mala-daddy.

I've been on a malatang bender these past few months so have been trying every spot I can drive to in the Bay. Unfortunately this place has been one of my least favorite so far. Not only did they have very limited + broth selection (only offering spicy and non spicy pork broth) compared to other malatang restaurants but the ingredients also didn't look the freshest. This place also has a pretty restrictive cash minimum though they do take venmo.