Cloudy weather calls for a meal that could warm your body up, since you are Single and ready to mingle and nobody hugs you but yourself. Ma La Xiang Guo seems like a good choice for this scenario and we went to La Kwok, one of the Ma La Surabaya restaurant that honestly, serves quite great Ma La Xiang Guo.
Ma La Xiang Guo from this resto suits the boxes for such a dish, with its heat from Sichuan Peppercorn, dried chilli, chilli oil, ginger, etc. Combined with your choices of meat and veg, the kitchen will then prep and cook those ingredients for you.
The dish basically means stir fried with Ma La or Sichuan Peppercorn, its sibling is Ma La Tang, which means all the ingredients in Ma La soup base. Typically served in massive bowl for 1 or 2, I had that back in the days of my youth in Sydney, when Ma La starts gaining its popularity (according to me). Since now I reside back in Surabaya, Indonesia, a Ma La Surabaya restaurant is my only option to have these dishes here.
You weigh in those veg and proteins you would like to have, I recommend you to share this dish with 2 or more mates, unless you are that hungry and sad. (I tried to share it with just 1 person and we both ended up too full, so no good). Price between both are slightly different, so bear in mind before stuffing your basket full of luncheon meat or chinese sausage (or do it, because YOLO and you exercise in the morning). Have some egg noodles too in it because it just works, tastes great since the noodle holds all those spices up, acting as a container of flavour to your tastebuds. Both Ma La Xiang Guo and Ma La Tang have the same procedure but I prefer Xiang Guo as it tastes better and less messy to eat stir fried dishes compared to massive bowl of soup.
Since it’s spicy and savoury, strong flavour of spices and salty, have it with a bowl of steamed rice. Like those chinese cuisine we normally know, we need rice to…… just we have to have rice. It’s a norm.
The 4 of us finished the dish and left the cilantro behind because, gosh, I couldn’t stand it, hate it. Maybe if you guys are a fan of cilantro, you guys will have cleaner plates than mine.
For more interesting dining places kindly have a peek and drop a Like or Follow at https://www.instagram.com/jasontandean/
And of course, more write-ups can be found at https://jasontandean.com/blog/
