This is the start of a series of posts in which I get lunch from every Chinese restaurant in the neighborhood. I am joined by my partner-in-dine who happens to be my partner-in-life, who for anonymity's sake will henceforth be referred to as They or Them depending on the grammatical context. Enough talk, let's eat.
Málà Project 麻辣计划
603 Manhattan Ave
Tuesday afternoon was hazy and humid. After dropping off our laundry, we walked over to Mala Project. Mala Project is a local chain of restaurants with an extremely over-engineered website specializing in dry pot (麻辣香锅), a dish that's supposedly quite popular in China. Calling it a dish doesn't feel quite right, as it is more like a restaurant concept than a recipe. So, here's a quick crash course, if you're not hip to the idea. The mala flavor profile is one that numbs your mouth with Sichuan peppercorns and burns it with chili peppers. Mala foods are typical of Sichuan cuisine. Hot pot restaurants are ones where diners cook their own ingredients in a pot of broth at the table. Sichuan (well, really Chongqing) style mala hot pot restaurants are popular in China and in the US. Now, dry pot is a reconfiguration of that idea. Dry pot retains the "pick your own ingredients" concept, but instead of you cooking those ingredients in soup, some guy in the back cooks it all in a wok and coats it with a numbing and spicy sauce that recalls a mala hot pot broth. Generally you eat it in a wooden bowl, and it's not necessarily communal like hot pot is, though it can be. Got it?
Anyway, pick-your-own-ingredient restaurants are quite popular in the US nowadays, especially in the office-lunch crowd. Chipotle, Sweetgreen, Just Salad, Chopt, the deli, the list goes on... I've never been a fan. Honestly, I don't like having that much choice. I also don't like worrying about how much each ingredient costs, and I know from experience that Mala Project bills can get quite high. That's why I was relieved when I saw that their lunch specials are both fixed-ingredient and fixed price, and include a handful of non-dry-pot stir-fries, like fried rice, fried noodles, and mapo tofu.
We went with the vegetarian dry pot special (broccoli, sweet, chiba tofu, and lotus root) with spicy sauce and white rice ($16) and the chaobing with chicken breast, egg, cabbage, and scallions. ($14).
The dry pot is all about a variety of textures all coated in the same sauce, one that is numbing and spicy, obviously, but savory, sweet, and almost medicinal as well. It's fun to eat because the light crunch of the lotus root feels so different from the heavy softness of the roasted sweet potato. As I said, I've had Mala dry pot before once at the East Village location with a friend, and it was as good then as it is now.
The chaobing I picked mainly out of curiosity. I'd never seen it on a menu before and it sounded interesting: chao 炒 is "stir-fried", 饼 is this case a scallion pancake. The dish is made by slicing up a bing into noodle-width strips and stir-frying them with leftovers like one would with fried rice. I liked the idea of stir-frying bread, so I gave it a go. In the end, though, I didn't love it. Maybe this was due to the condensation, but the bing was less like the flaky oily ones I expected, and its texture was more like pita bread. It was good bread no doubt, but it didn't really have the wok-charred texture or flavor I wanted. Glad I tried it though.
In total, the meal cost us $32, which is definitely high for lunch, but this is the 2020s New York Reality we're living in. I probably wouldn't go back there again for lunch, though any sort of mala pot place, dry or hot, is fun with friends and drinks, as it encourages group creativity ("Meatballs or shrimp? ... Or both?") as well as feats of endurance ("How long can we eat mind-blowingly spicy food before they tell us to leave?").
Last, apropos of nothing, I want to say that before Mala Project was in 603 Manhattan Ave, the building housed Sikorsky Meat Market, which I never went to (didn't live here yet), but it's a shame to see places like that go. There are definitely too few old-school legitimate meat markets in the city.
Oh, and here's the current lunch menu:
