I had a late lunch today at Tang Bar in the Stonestown mall. Tang Bar is a restaurant where you can build your own bowl of malatang. It’s kind of like a hot pot but where they cook it all for you.
You have a choice of broths, and there are also dry pot options. For both, it is $16.99 a pound.
The bowls to put your ingredients in, along with some plastic gloves.
All sorts of meats.
Seafood , meatballs, and some cooked meat options.
Fishballs, including an interesting one that looked like a striped mint, SPAM
More fishballs, eggs, tofu, tofu skins
Vegetables
More vegetables
Even more vegetables, fungi, and noodles
More noodles, youtiao, rice cakes
There’s a scale to weigh your bowl. I should have made use of this. “Eyes bigger than your belly?” Yes.
Once you reach the register you put your bowl on the scale, pick your soup (or flavor if dry pot) and pay based on the weight ($16.99 / lb). My bowl had wagyu beef, short plate beef, various fish balls, sliced pork belly, beef tendon, napa cabbage, crown daisy, tofu, a youtiao, and wide sweet potato noodles, and probably some other stuff I forgot about. I picked the hot and sour broth option.
My bowl before cooking
My eyes were a bit too big for my stomach and my total weight was a bit over 3 pounds, which after subtracting the tare weight of the bowl resulted in a $40+ dollar malatang 
A short wait afterwards my bowl was ready.
It was pretty good. The beef was tender and the wide sweet potato noodles were very chewy. The pre-cooked meats also softened after cooking - the beef tendon in particular was quite tender and gelatinous. I think next time I’ll go for some rice noodles and/or maybe the thinner sweet potato noodles. The hot and sour broth was indeed hot and sour - there was a good bit of numbing Sichuan peppercorn and chili, and a large amount of chili oil on top as well as some crunchy cowpeas. This broth isn’t meant to drink I think, at least not all of it, as it was quite intense and also quite salty. The tofu and youtiao that I added were good for soaking up the broth. It was a good bowl of malatang, but quite expensive. I think next time I will be more judicious with my choices!
