If you want hot pot without the hours-long commitment and hefty price tag, CuanYue Malatang, located on El Camino Real in Sunnyvale, is the answer.
Malatang has quickly become a go-to meal in the Bay — it’s essentially a build-your-own personal hot pot, allowing for fully customizable ingredient selections served in a Sichuan-style broth. After trying spots like LiuKouShiu across from Mainstreet, we decided to test out CuanYue Malatang, a China-based chain that opened its first U.S. location here in January.
Walking inside, we were greeted by friendly staff who showed us to a table. The restaurant was relatively small, well-lit and also had outdoor seating that made it comfortable and inviting.
A key feature of malatang is that you can choose everything that goes in your meal. So, we each grabbed an empty bowl, a pair of tongs and walked through a buffet-style ingredient bar with vegetables, fungi, tofu, noodles, sliced hotpot meat and seafood — filling our bowl with ingredients and portions to our preference. The ingredients at this restaurant looked especially fresh. Even the intestines and fish slices (which tend to look dry or mangled at cheap places) were correctly colored and clean.
Malatang is priced by weight, so you learn that you get more value with some items than others; that means there are optimal techniques to maximize the value for your money. Luckily, we are experienced malatang-eaters and knew to save space in our bowl for the sliced meat located at the last ingredient bar. We also tried to shake off as much water off the vegetables as possible to get the most out of our money.
At checkout, our bowls were weighed and priced at a reasonable $14.99 per pound, similar to that of LiuKouShiu. Our bowls came in at totals of $17.14, $18.01 and $20.41 for Amy, Shirina and Emily respectively.
Customers are also given the option to choose their soup base, which includes tomato, bone broth, spicy sour, spicy chili oil and spicy dry mix. All three of us went with the classic Sichuan spicy chili oil soup base because we wanted to taste the quintessential spicy and numbing Sichuan flavor.
Then, our bowls were brought into the kitchen to be prepared while we went to the build-your-own sauce station. The cashier also gave us complementary bibs, which allowed us to eat without fear of the bright red soup staining our clothes.
Surprisingly, the sauce station at CuanYue was a lot smaller than those we’ve seen in other hotpot and malatang places, with only 14 sauce selections. Emily and Amy wished there was a spicy chili oil that included solid flakes instead of just chili oil, since the oil itself lacks the intensity of spice they desired.
The selection included most of the standard sauces, including sesame, vinegar, soy sauce and oyster sauce. We did not expect how flavorful the sauces would be and made our sauces a little too salty, but that was easily adjusted by adding more sesame sauce and vinegar.
Right when we were walking back from the sauce station, the server was already delivering the malatang to our table. Less than 10 minutes passed between the time we ordered and when our food arrived, making CuanYue Malatang great for a quick and delicious meal.
The Sichuan spiciness was manageable at both the mild and medium heat levels, adding a fragrant chili taste without burning our tongues. Compared to the other malatang places we have tried, we much preferred the rich, savory broth of CuanYue.
However, one flaw was that the udon noodles in Shirina’s bowl were overcooked and lost its bouncy texture, though the other ingredients were cooked just right. Additionally, we wished the large napa cabbage leaves were cut up into bite-sized pieces to make them easier to eat — though this wasn’t a deal-breaker.
In the end, we thoroughly enjoyed our dining experience, each emptying our bowls completely. Though it’s a 20-minute drive from Saratoga, CuanYue Malatang is now our go-to malatang destination.
Rating: 4.75 out of 5 Falcons
