Justin C.
Yelp
I'm giving it five stars to offset all the negative reviews so far... I fail to see how someone paid "$40 for a little bowl". No way. regardless, know that I actually think this place deserves 3-4 stars. My coworker finally brought me here on a lunch break. We were going to get four orders to go. We got there at about 12:30ish.
TLDR: Ma la tang (numbing spicy soup) option is the way to go. It's delicious. However, ingredients aren't so delicious so you kinda have to mix it. Amazing to have on a cold day or if you're sick. They need to hire more workers. It took me 1 hr 40 mins to get my food. Also, bring someone who preferably reads and speaks Chinese.
So how this place works is you buy the soup fo $1.50? and then you pay a base price for what meat you want (lamb, beef, pork?) and then you can add more toppings like veggies, noodles, tofu, and fish / meat balls and pay PER POUND. It's a bit hard for me to understand how this place works, everything was written in Chinese and I'm illiterate in that language.
My coworker immediately noticed that they were low / out of quite a few ingredients. I think there were only two workers that were there when we went. One cooking in the back, one manning the register. They were out of lotus root, wood ear, spam, tofu.... squid strips? I'm not entirely sure. The list goes on and on. There were two or three tables of people eating already and a party of two ahead of us. I picked out what I wanted... I wasn't to sure what to get so I got fish balls, shrimp balls, beef balls, fried tofu, three types of mushrooms, pig blood, and some cellophane noodles. Was hoping they would have glass noodles like the ones at boiling point but nope. The other choices were something that looked like homemade pasta or ramen noodles. Oh yeah. you can either get it gan chao (dry fried) or ma la tang (numbing spicy soup). I opted for the latter. Mild spicyness
Anyways finally, after my coworker waited to restock the ingredients, we gave them our orders. We weren't sure if we should get another order for another coworker and we finally decided to about 10-20 mins later. Even though people came in after us, I'm very thankful that they had the foresight to bump that order up so we could get everything at the same time and get out of there... Despite their efforts, it took about an hour and forty mins (1 hr 40 mins) to get our food.
Finally. THE FOOD! They separate the ingredients from the soup. I was so excited to eat that I forgot to take pics... but the soup is basically liquid broth with a millimeter of chilli oil floating on top. Despite my efforts to mix the oil with the soup, the coat of chilli oil would float back on top... Pretty weird. I constantly mixed it the best i could to get a good ratio of soup and chilli oil on my spoon. Man the soup was absolutely amazing. Super spicy, full flavored, not extremely salty but I'd say above average in saltyness. The ingredients were pretty dry and tasteless so you kind of have to drink the soup as you eat the ingredients. For my personal tastes, the only thing I liked was the beef balls and the variety of mushrooms they had... plus the meat.
They need to figure their stuff out... they need to hire / train more workers... and maybe get some menus and translate to english.