I’ve had a few other ma la tangs before and Gong Yuan’s has been the better one so far! I went with the medium spice and unlike the others I’ve tried that weren’t spicy, I liked the good heat and tingling numbness this had. It also wasn’t too oily and was drinkable with its pork bone broth base that gave a light creaminess to it. This kind of ma la tangs are not as popular yet, so it would be good to manage expectations that its mala is different from the more common steamboat kind. The choice of ingredients are the typical ones you would see in mlxg stalls, but go for their thick sweet potato noodles (the kind usually used in 酸辣粉 suan la fen) as it absorbed the broth well. Apart from ma la, they also have pork bone and pickled vegetable broths.

It’s kinda pricey at $2.88 per 100g across the variety of ingredients you can pick from, especially since I usually stick to the veg selection with my mlxg. Also, Gong Yuan doesn’t seem to have the practice of draining out the water from your bowl of chosen ingredients, so just make a mental note to shake off the water when you’re kiap-ing them, or it would add on to the final weight.