Seeking comfort in a new city, I went on a search for malatang and found more than soup

The first time I tried malatang, it was spring in southern California. I was nearly delirious from days of staying up until the wee hours of the morning finishing my senior anthropology thesis. I turned in all 40 single-spaced pages of it in my friend Alice’s apartment, where we’d gone because the library, which closed at 2 a.m., had kicked us out.

After hitting send, I collapsed on the sofa. Alice, who’d turned in their own thesis a week earlier but had been frantically putting together a thesis presentation, turned to me. “We need to celebrate,” they said. 

A few days later, Alice took me to YangGuoFu, a popular Chinese malatang chain. They showed me how to pick the vegetables, meat and noodles. Then, I chose the type of broth and the spice level. 

I swallowed a spoonful and slid down in my chair. It was spicy and rich and a little creamy from the sesame paste that Alice, who’s from northern China, showed me how to add. I slurped down the thick noodles and crunched on the bok choy. We didn’t talk much, too absorbed in savoring our soups. 

A soup that doesn't shame you for eating alone

Malatang is a Sichuan street food that’s become extremely popular all over China. Known as a cheaper, one-person version of hot pot, malatang directly translates to “numbing, spicy boil,” which references the story commonly told about its origins. People working on barges on the Minjiang River cooked ingredients over an open fire on the riverbank, throwing in Sichuan’s iconic peppercorns to season the soup. 

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It's a dish easily eaten alone, and quickly, unlike hot pot, which people linger over for hours. At YangGuoFu, many diners were by themselves, hunched over their steaming bowls of soup. 

There was comfort contained in those large metal bowls. 

In the weeks leading up to that day, a problem I’d been struggling with since my junior year of college had come back in full force: when I get stressed and anxious, my appetite vanishes. I found myself staring down a plate of barbecue meat and rice in the dining hall, unable to bring myself to eat more than a few bites. I threw away a perfectly good egg sandwich because for the life of me, I could not force it down my throat. 

This symptom of anxiety has brought me a lot of grief. I take a lot of pleasure in food, and it was extremely inconvenient as a college athlete back then and as a dining reporter now.

I discovered, however, that there were two things I could always eat: fresh fruit and good, hot soup. Soup of any kind. The soups at my college’s dining hall — albondigas, 12-vegetable soup, the occasional bowl of pho — helped get me through that semester. 

So when Alice took me to get malatang, it felt like I’d found the ultimate comfort food — tailor-made for stressed-out students and lonely young adults. It’s cheap. It’s healthy. The spiciness makes you sweat out whatever’s causing you tension. And unlike hot pot, which requires a group of friends, malatang doesn’t shame you for eating alone. 

A quest for malatang in metro Phoenix

After that dinner, I was hooked. But I didn’t have time to eat that malatang again before I graduated and left southern California. When I moved to Phoenix in 2024, I soon discovered the swath of Asian restaurants and grocery stores peppering the East Valley. I assumed it would be easy to find malatang. Instead, it turned into a months-long quest.

Only a few weeks into living here, I went grocery shopping at 99 Ranch Market and saw a sign for a malatang restaurant called Sorimmara in the food court. I went up to the booth to read the menu and realized it was a South Korean chain. Sorimmara has over 200 stores in South Korea, according to its Instagram. 

I shouldn’t have been surprised — there’s a long history of Korean-Chinese food made by Chinese immigrants to Korea. The cuisine even has its own Wikipedia page. One of the most iconic dishes is jajangmyeon, noodles topped with a black bean sauce that’s a twist of the northern Chinese zhájiàngmiàn. 

I picked out a pound’s worth of cabbage, tofu, fish balls and other ingredients and brought it to the cashier. I chose a spiciness level in the middle of their range, which goes from “white clear soup” to “hell.” 

When I was handed my bowl, I immediately noticed the fiery red color. I summoned my courage and took a bite. Heat overtook my mouth. My tongue and lips started burning. I made it through half, but it was not a pleasant experience. Most of the spice came from a chili oil that was added to the broth. It floated to the top, making every bite feel like I was sipping straight oil. My vegetables floated limply in the soup. 

I like heat. I've eaten hot pot in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, the capital of mala. But to be good, something can’t only be spicy. It also has to have flavor. 

I left 99 Ranch determined to find a better version.

Is the Asian food scene here really that bad?

After that sad summer day in 99 Ranch, I gave up trying to find malatang for a while, satisfying my craving with bowls of soup from Phở Thành. But when the weather finally cooled off, I found myself yearning for the specific taste of malatang. 

I decided to renew my quest, but this time, I expanded my search. I figured that one-person hot pot might scratch the itch. I turned to a rich resource that I’d discovered while working as a food reporter: a Facebook group called Arizona Asian Foodies. I asked if anyone knew of any malatang places. In my post, I mentioned that I recently moved here from California, without including that I grew up in Tucson. This was a mistake. People roasted me for coming to Arizona expecting to find a similar Asian food landscape. 

“I just cackle when Californians move to AZ and think we have all this diverse food,” one commenter wrote. 

While I’d argue that the options for Asian food in the San Gabriel Valley in southern California are the best in the country, the ease with which people dismissed the metro Phoenix area’s Asian food scene didn’t sit right with me.  

Could it really be that bad? 

A hot pot detour

Per the suggestions of the group, I visited four hot pot restaurants.

First, I went to Pop Pot & Tea in Chandler, where I ordered the mushroom pot ($17.99). All the ingredients are pre-selected and the sizzling bowl of broth came studded with mushrooms, beef and leafy greens. The soup was light and savory. I enjoyed it, but it did nothing to diminish my appetite for malatang, which has a much more complex flavor profile. 

Next, I tried Tasty Pot in Mekong Plaza with my brother. We got the Taiwanese Supreme Spicy Hot Soup, which came with several cuts of beef and pork, mushrooms, tofu and seafood ($20.99). It was good. The broth was salty with a strong umami flavor with hints of pork and cabbage. One of the servers rushing around stopped long enough to tell us that the soup was made with a powder that was then simmered with onions and cabbage for hours. For something that is effectively a fancy version of instant noodles, it was delicious and relatively cheap. 

But it wasn't malatang. 

With a growing sense of certainty that I would not find what I was looking for, I visited Top One Hot Pot in Mesa and Jin Shabu, a Japanese hot pot restaurant in Chandler.

Top One Hot Pot had a delicious sour, spicy Tom Yum soup that left my taste buds tingling. But overall, I’m not a huge fan of the aesthetic of pan-Asian restaurants, which Top One is, and the shared hot pots all came with a pre-chosen selection of meat and vegetables, making the experience less fun overall. 

Jin Shabu, on the other hand, was the highlight of my hot pot journey — I went with three friends, and we ate for hours, pulling delicate cuts of lamb and beef out of the spicy katsuobushi broth made with fish flakes, dipping crunchy cabbage and slippery glass noodles into the light tonkotsu broth on the other side of the pot. The restaurant is all-you-can-eat, and we ended up paying around $50 a person.

Although delicious, it’s the type of nice restaurant that I’d go to with a group of friends on occasion, not the type of restaurant where I could pick up a bowl of soup by myself on a cold winter night. 

A mysterious malatang hits the mark

I emerged from my mini-tour of hot pot restaurants dissatisfied. Nothing offered a similar flavor profile to malatang or matched the ease of ordering that is a key feature of malatang restaurants. 

I returned to the responses on my Arizona Asian Foodies post, hoping I’d missed something.

A photo caught my eye. Someone had searched “malatang” in Fantuan, which is a Chinese food-delivery app that specializes in Asian food. Two results came up: Sorimmara and a place with a name in Chinese characters that translated to “Sichuan flavor malatang” (川味麻辣烫). 

I’d seen the photo before but abandoned hope after I searched for the place on both Google Maps and Baidu Maps, a Chinese search engine, and nothing came up. This time around, I downloaded Fantuan. The same characters came up, and I clicked on them to see if I could actually buy the malatang. I filled out an order for a malatang, choosing from a variety of fresh ingredients, though I still had no idea where this restaurant was or what it was called. 

It was only when I was given the pick-up address that the mystery was solved. It was a match for Shaanxi Garden, a popular and well-regarded Chinese restaurant in Mesa. When I arrived, server Jun Yu cleared things up even further. 

He explained that the restaurant started selling malatang three years earlier at the request of customers. They had a refrigerator near the door where people could choose what they wanted to be boiled in their soup. But demand wasn't sufficient to keep the offering. Perishable produce like cabbage or bok choy sat unsold in the fridge, eventually spoiling. Shaanxi removed malatang from the menu and now offers it only via Fantuan for take-out.

Shaanxi Garden has three different broth options. I ordered two of them, both $18.99: “Fun Spicy Red Soup Sopa Picante” and “Awesome Milk Mala Tang Leche” (we should name all our dishes like this). The broths are made fresh daily using chicken broth, ground peppercorns and vegetables, Yu said. And it showed. 

The “fun spicy” red soup was a more traditional malatang flavor where mala, the tongue-tingling Sichuan spice, reigns supreme. The “awesome milk” malatang was made by adding milk to the broth to cool down the spice and create a more creamy flavor. 

Both were delicious. The red malatang was spicy and fragrant and the milk malatang was velvety and spicy with a deep, savory flavor. 

And — joy of joys — Shaanxi offers optional sesame paste on the side. I stirred that in, and the experience was complete. I finally found what I was looking for. 

A second chance for malatang

I shared the soup with a friend who’d never had malatang before. We ended up slurping more than speaking — a hallmark, I’m learning, of good malatang. 

Warm and satisfied, I still felt like something was unfinished.

I realized that I needed to return to Sorimmara, which is the only dedicated malatang restaurant in metro Phoenix that I've found, and give them another chance.

This time, I took Jaehee Kim, an international journalist from South Korea doing a journalism fellowship at Arizona State University. Having her there made such a difference. She chatted with the chef, Minsoo Kim, who told us that the restaurant imports spices and a powdered soup base from Korea and boils them with onions and garlic and vegetables to make the soup.  We also learned that the brand planned to open its first stand-alone store in Gilbert, which has since opened.

Jaehee encouraged me to try the Rosé Mala Xiang Guo ($16.75), a Sorimmara specialty that mixes a spicy mala sauce with cream to create what she called a Korean version of spicy carbonara. We also ordered a classic malatang ($17.04). This time, I got a level two on the spiciness scale. 

I was confused by my first swallow of soup. It was nothing like that first bowl. The broth was umami and salty with just a hint of spice. The egg noodles and tofu cubes were infused with a warm, tingly flavor. How could I have had such a different experience when I visited in the summer?

As Jaehee and I relaxed into the pleasure of eating, we puzzled over this question. 

I realized that one mistake I'd made was ordering it too spicy, which meant I couldn’t really taste the soup. Also, as Jaehee pointed out, sometimes it’s simply too hot outside for malatang.

Feeling satisfied, our discussion moved on to musing over what makes malatang so comforting. Our theories ranged from the cathartic feeling of sweating after eating something spicy to the pleasure of choosing your own ingredients.  

“It’s not very expensive, right?” Jaehee said. “So with very little money, you feel like you become really rich because you can eat whatever you want.” 

That made me laugh. After we finished, we wandered around 99 Ranch, talking about our experiences as Phoenix newcomers. Eating with someone who I didn’t have to explain malatang to, who was just as crazy about it as I was — I’d missed that feeling so much. 

The whole time, I thought I’d been searching for good malatang. And I was. But what I was really looking for was the feeling of my first time eating it with Alice — the quiet comfort of knowing that we liked the same food, that we spoke the same language of care.

Maybe the malatang at Sorimmara tasted so good because Jaehee and I ate it together. 

Where to find comforting Asian soups in Mesa, Chandler and Gilbert

Here's a guide to the restaurants and dishes I tried on my quest.

Malatang at Shaanxi Garden (via Fantuan)

Serving up northwestern Chinese cuisine, Shaanxi Garden received a glowing review from The Republic's former food critic in 2018. Malatang can be ordered only on Fantuan, where Shaanxi offers three types of broth and a large menu of ingredients to choose from.

Details: 67 N. Dobson Road, #109, Mesa. 480-733-8888. @shaanxigarden on Instagram.

Malatang at Sorimmara

A Korean malatang chain, Sorimmara has two locations in the metro Phoenix area, in the Chandler 99 Ranch and in Gilbert.

Details: 1920 W. Chandler Blvd., Chandler. 623-439-6510 and 1939 E. Baseline Road #114, Gilbert. 480-687-4102, sorimmarachandler.com.

Hot pot at Pop Pot & Tea 

This is a Taiwanese restaurant that offers individual hot pots, as well as some other dishes like minced pork with rice and a wide variety of milk tea.

Details: 2015 N. Dobson Road, #2, Chandler. 480-219-9466, poppotaz.com.

Hot pot at Tasty Pot

Located inside the bustling Mekong Plaza, this busy restaurant offers Taiwanese one-pot hot pots and milk tea.

Details: 66 S. Dobson Road, #148, Mesa. 480-809-6780, tastypotusa.com.

Hot pot at Top One Hot Pot & Asian Cuisine

This pan-Asian restaurant offers a menu of rice and noodles dishes, from chow mein to kimchi fried rice, as well as dumplings and hot pots of different sizes.

Details: 1914 S. Power Road, #101, Mesa. 480-207-7250, toponeaz.com.

Hot pot at Jin Shabu

This Japanese all-you-can-eat hot pot restaurant is on the fancier side, with a bar in the middle of the restaurant where you can mix your own sauces and choose your own vegetables.

Details: 2055 N. Dobson Road, C5, Chandler. 602-396-2988, jinshabu.net.

Developing dining scene:A booming Taiwanese restaurant scene serves TSMC workers a taste of home in Phoenix

Reach the reporter at [email protected]. Follow @Reialirui on X, formerly Twitter.