Mala on a rainy day @ Yang Guo Fu ($33.22)!
Yang Guo Fu (杨国福) mala tang on a rainy day: two pick-your-own soup bowls with fish balls, beancurd skin, luncheon meat, quail eggs and greens in the signature tomato-bone mala broth. $33.22.
Mala on a rainy day, Yang Guo Fu (杨国福), $33.22 for two bowls! 😍😋👍🏼
What was in the signature orange bowls:
- Bowl 1: leafy greens, fried beancurd, beancurd skin rolls, luncheon meat slices, quail eggs, fish balls, crab stick, instant noodles underneath
- Bowl 2: fish balls, fried fish skin, lotus-leaf-wrapped beancurd, purple cabbage, the same mala soup base
- The broth: the orange-red mala tang soup, fragrant rather than aggressive, the numbing heat sitting in the background
Yang Guo Fu (杨国福麻辣烫) is the biggest mala tang chain on the planet: started by Mr Yang Guo Fu in Harbin in 2003, now over 6,000 outlets across China and overseas, including Singapore (the first local stalls opened in 2020). The thing that made the brand: their broth is drinkable. Where old-school mala xiang guo is an oil-slicked dry stir-fry, YGF’s mala tang is a soup, and Mr Yang’s signature tweak was adding milk and sugar to the Sichuan spice base, rounding the numbing heat so you can actually finish the bowl.
The format: grab a bowl, tong whatever you want from the fridge walls (the meatball-and-beancurd aisle is the danger zone), pay by weight, pick your spice level. The $33.22 here is the classic pay-by-weight trap: every “just one more” fish ball is real money. Worth it on a rainy day.
Spice calibration: the broth photographed here is the gentler tier, the level where the ma (numbing) hums instead of bites. YGF’s scale goes from clear-soup coward to full Sichuan; the middle settings are where the flavour lives.
Rainy-day logic needs no defending: hot numbing soup, steamed-up windows, a tray of exactly the ingredients you chose. The mala tang version of hot pot for two, without the table grill commitment.
Overall: 4 / 5. 😋👍🏼 The tomato-tinged broth stayed drinkable to the bottom. Pay-by-weight discipline: still in training. Would re-visit, ideally during a thunderstorm.
