Two New Yorkers Bring the Heat at This New Sichuan Restaurant in Highland Park

About a decade ago, Sichuan cuisine was booming in and around Los Angeles, with Chengdu Taste and Sichuan Impression launching an era of chile-tinted, peppercorn-laced dishes, especially in the San Gabriel Valley. Since then, it’s been fairly quiet in the realms of Sichuan cuisine, until late June, when Mala Class opened in Highland Park inside a former Salvadoran restaurant along York Boulevard.

The restaurant is led by Kevin Liang and chef Michael Yang, two former New Yorkers who have brought their A-game to one of Los Angeles’s busiest neighborhoods with reasonably priced, modern Sichuan dishes, including dumplings, fried chicken wings, and noodles galore. Liang spent years heading a number of restaurants for Han Dynasty — one of the East Coast’s most popular and successful Sichuan restaurant chains. Sichuan-born Yang cooked around New York City, including in the highly competitive neighborhood of Flushing, Queens.

The duo spent two years refurbishing this standalone restaurant space in Highland Park. The historically Latine neighborhood, which has undergone waves of gentrification and development in recent years, is now home to a restaurant whose name literally means “bad” in Spanish — but málà here refers to the two-headed numbing spice of Sichuan cuisine. Liang and Yang are here to bring this part of Los Angeles their distinct kind of chile-addled cooking.

The menu opens with tasty fried snacks that are difficult to stop eating. A cumin dry rub covers crisp enoki mushroom fries, while cubes of fried tofu come heavily dusted with a dry pepper rub. Marinated cucumber and soybean curd slices help cool off the spicy starters, while fried chicken wings enveloped in a chile dry rub bring the heat back. Hefty pork dumplings doused in a garlicky soy sauce and chile oil stay somewhere in the middle of the spice range.

Three noodle options offer differing layers of flavor and heat. The milder sesame noodles are almost cold, and taste refreshing, with expertly julienned cucumber. A dense sauce coats the dan dan noodles, made even more robust with ground pork and spicy chile oil. (This one may require some napkins to soak up the beads of brow sweat.) Yang’s spicy beef noodle soup is a solid rendition of a dish found across China.

No Sichuan restaurant could open without its own version of mapo tofu, and the well-sauced version here comes with a fine dusting of ground peppercorn, its flavors dialed up to 11. The menu rounds out with fried garlic shrimp with diced lotus root, onions, and jalapeño. Liang says the menu will eventually grow to Sichuan classics like eggplant, but with the entire crew just himself and Yang, the restaurant will have to increase its staff count first.

The arrival of Mala Class adds another compelling place to eat on this eastern edge of York Boulevard, especially with the recent shuttering of the Wavy Gravy diner across the street. And given the tight but shareable menu, it wouldn’t be surprising if this was the first of multiple locations for an emerging Sichuan restaurant brand in Los Angeles.

Mala Class is open at 5816 York Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA, 90042 from Tuesday to Friday, 12 p.m. to 3:30 p.m., with dinner service from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. They’re open continuously from 12 p.m. to 10 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays, closed Mondays.

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