LALA Spicy Lab Downtown 辣辣冒菜 — Restaurant in Toronto

While beef noodles may seem overdone, what makes LALA’s spicy tenderloin beef noodles ($17.99) special is the golden egg. Imagine a funnel cake made from scrambled egg that sits in broth absorbing flavours while still retaining the fluffy eggy texture. I thoroughly enjoyed it with the juicy tomato broth as it captures the classic Chinese flavours of tomato & egg and tomato & beef so well. I’d order this again.

Most customers go for the maocai, a shallow hot pot containing a mix of vegetables and proteins stewed together in a sauce that’s usually mala based. At LALA Spicy Lab, you customize the dish by choosing the:

Base: mala soup, dry mixed, or a spicy sesame peanut paste mix. Staple dish / carb: rice or noodles (choice of egg, handcrafted thick, Wuhan style alkaline, sweet potato, or rice). Spiciness level: from extra mild to extra super spicy

Already the medium dry mix sliced beef brisket maocai ($19.99) had my mouth stinging. Luckily, when our server came around to ask how we were and I expressed I should have gone with mild, she brought a bowl of broth so I could dilute and wash off some of the chilis. Finally, I could actually enjoy the ingredients used in the dish.

The beef brisket was sliced too thinly for my taste, resembling what you find in pho becoming lost in maocai. I’d recommend going with the tenderloin beef option ($21.99) instead as they’re thicker slices.

Aside from the beef, the maocai also contained a selection of 15 other ingredients. It’s a treasure hunt digging through the dish to find things like Spam, thumb-sized sweet sausages, fish balls, quail eggs, tofu, or a variety of vegetables (bean sprouts, winter melon, baby corn, etc.). A dozen more ingredients are available for a supplement like fried dough sticks ($3.99), shawarma chicken ($8.99), or the delicious golden fried egg ($3.99).

With both dishes, I opted for the handcrafted thick noodles. In the dry mix it was chewy and pulled the chili flakes into its cervices for maximum heat. Meanwhile, in the tomato broth, the noodles had a silkier texture. Either way, noodles work!

If things get too spicy, their ice cream parfait ($4.99 with a meal or $6.99 solo) is a great way to calm the scorching heat. At first glance, I was sure the brown sugar parfait would be my favourite as it’s essentially a bubble tea made into ice cream: black tea ice cream, tapioca, black tea jelly, and grass jelly layered in the cup with brown sugar coffee syrup and a few chocolate shavings on top. And LALA doesn’t skimp on the boba, so this is a meal.

Yet, it was the citrus garden parfait that had me digging through to get to every layer. The base of green tea ice cream is fairly light so the lemon honey syrup shines through. And while the slice of orange seemed weird in the parfait, it surprisingly works with the black tea jelly not unlike having a lemon tea. You must make it to the end as the green tea loaf cake at the bottom is what steals the show, soaking up the flavours from above including the coconutty shaved ice...

This place is located right opposite to UofT downtown and is a small but mighty gem.

The person serving us was so warm and welcoming, she made the whole experience 10 times better.

Me and my boyfriend didn’t realize that the quantity was so huge so we ended up ordering two hotpots each and received two complimentary parfaits with it - one in green tea and the other in black tea boba flavour. I personally liked the black tea more.

Coming to the food, there was a lot of food and realistically the hotpots are enough for two people to share. It had all the good stuff added by default so we didn’t pick any extra add-ons. Some of the default options included tofu, fish ball, crab meat, quail eggs, sweet sausage, zucchini and there were lots more! I loved the maocai flavour hotpot. It was spicy but we went for less numbing peppercorn and the flavour went so well with the extra added cilantro!

The tomato flavour was good too, it tasted like a tom yum soup flavour with a hint of spice but my favourite was the maocai! The tomato is a good option for less spice lovers.

Our server also checked in between our meal to see if we were okay with the spice level coz she saw us struggling for a bit there (honestly we were taking our time to eat coz it was way too much food for two of us), but I thought it was really a sign of good hospitality and paying attention to details.

I’ll be coming back in the future with my other...

I enjoyed the delicious food and the friendliness of the servers. They had a cozy atmosphere and the place was clean and well-kept.

Their portions were massive and they were definitely generous with their ingredients. I brought my friend who used to live in Chengdu and she told me that the flavors are authentic and rich. We chose the Signature Mao Cai with soup with beef brisket and the Spicy Sesame Peanut Paste Mix with Beef Tenderloin. The server was kind enough to let us know the spice profile of the dishes and we chose medium spicy for the sesame peanut paste mix and mild spicy for the soup. Both dishes were 5/5. I recommend their Handcrafted Thick Noodles for the dry mix and the Sweet Potato Noodles for the soup. Both types of noodles gave a fun bouncy and chewy texture to the two dishes.

We also had their parfaits: Black Tea Parfait and Green Tea Parfait. The black tea had boba and grass jelly and the green tea had hints of citrus notes with grass jelly and green tea loaf cake. We thoroughly enjoyed both parfaits as they were not too sweet and were perfect to finish off our spicy meals.

One thing we really appreciated was how our server was so helpful. She answered our questions and regularly checked up on us to see if we...