Pick your own ingredients, and they will cook it in their signature soup.
Great for those cold days when you feel hungry, but be careful as it is easy to go overboard and order too much food.
Place gets packed so best to go early or late (after 8:30pm) to ensure that you get a seat.
Yang Guo Fu Ma La Tang Kingsford is probably the cleanest exemplar of this chain I’ve visited, perhaps because, being in Kingsford, it’s in slightly lower demand than either of their bustling Haymarket or Burwood stores. Despite this, I still found this decor-free white space doing a roaring trade at 9.25pm on a Monday night, with every table occupied. The process at each store is exactly the same: you grab your bowl and some tongs, load it up with your own selection of ingredients, get it weighed, cooked, and then dressed with sauces before settling in for a spicy soup that leaves laksa for dead.
Being a malatang veteran, I’ve got a lot better at making my ingredient selections. I don’t add more than one of each thing, and I add twice the amount of greens I think I need, because they shrink considerably. I don’t sweat not knowing what things are. Everything that lines the two bain Maries tastes great when eaten in the spicy malatang, from explosive quail eggs to brown dried scallops. Our resulting soups both come in around the twelve-buck mark for a complete meal in a bowl.
Being unlicensed, I take two punts at Asian drink lotto without worrying about what they are either. Today it produces a Japanese drink called Calpis ($3.50) made with milk, yeast and lactic acid bacterium that’s cooling and soothing after forays into the spicy soup, and a Coconut Palm ($3.50) brand coconut juice that has a lightly creamy, tannic, almost tea-like flavour. On their own they both are slightly sweet, but this works out to be a relief after you dig into your malatang.
Your biggest problem here will be parking, thanks to the NSW Government’s ongoing destruction of a major arterial: ANZAC Parade. Their seemingly endless, over-budget light rail construction is now slated to ruin trade for these local small businesses until March 2020.
Don’t expect five-star service but the variety of ingredients is great, they cook your food for you and the soup is delicious! Spicy, salty, sweet, sour.
You choose what goes in your soup; greens, mushrooms, tofu, Chinese veges, proteins, noodles, a variety of fish and meat balls. Then choose your toppings. Pretty good as you pay for only what you choose. Could do with better cutlery and beverage choices.
Delicious soup base. Big ingredients variety. Great value.
Big bowl of fun. I enjoy the variety of options to add to my noodles. My girlfriend recommended the fried Taco Bell. Unsure what it was but it was certainly tasty. I went for the hottest option and added chilli oil which was a bit silly ha ha. Even those with the most iron of stomachs will be put to the test! $20 for a a generous serving that can satisfy two people. 5 stars. Cheers
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