YGF Malatang 杨国福麻辣烫 — Restaurant in Arcadia

I have been wanting to try this hotpot place and finally got to go this weekend. I came around 12pm and there wasn't a wait to get your table. The employee first assigns you a table and then you can grab a bowl and start choosing your hotpot ingredients.

They have lots of options for vegetables, meat, and other hotpot toppings. I would say their noodle options are a bit lacking though. They have beef, lamb, and seafood options. A lot of Asian vegetables and others like mushrooms, baby corn, etc.

After choosing, you give it to the employee to weigh and choose your soup. After that, they give you a key tag with your bowl number. You can also order their drinks and other side dishes here. I got the tomato broth since it is the only non-spicy broth and I wasn't sure how mild their mild is. I also ordered the brown sugar rice cake ($6.5).

Then you walk inside and find your table and make your sauce as the sauce station. They have plenty of tables and the seating area is designed nicely and atmosphere is comfortable.

The food was ready in less than 10 minutes. The broth tasted a lot like tomatoes and wasn't super special. The ingredients I chose were cooked well and did taste alright. I can't tell if the beef slices is good quality but it was quite fatty. And the brown sugar rice cakes were pretty good, not too sweet and fried nicely.

I would consider coming back another time with other family to try another broth and see if that was better. I do like their hotpot system where you pay by weight so you pay for exactly how much you can finish and what it weighs. Their service is also pretty good, employees are friendly with...

If you haven’t been here before the setup might be confusing. You should head all the way to the back, go to the cashier, tell him the number of people, get a table number from him, and then get a bowl and start putting stuff you want in the bowl. The bowl is weighed and charged by the pound, but you don’t pay until you’re done eating. Then you hand the bowls to the cashier to order what type of soup you want. They hand you order numbers and you go to your table and just wait for them to bring you food. You can also make sauces at the sauce station. When you’re finished, bring your bowls back to the front and pay.

Also note that you get one tong for picking up all the foods, so if cross contamination is a concern or you have food allergies, this might not be the best place to go.

The lady in the front was not helpful and just shouted Chinese at us and acted like we were in her way for not knowing the rules. Some of the customers tried to help us too, but they should really just post the rules outside the store or in front of the front door to help newcomers. I think if you look East Asian, they will assume you speak Mandarin, so you should mention that you don’t speak it to clear the air. The rest of service was fine and nice, just the initial confusion didn’t...

Awesome place to get a group of people together for hotpot! Friendly staff and fast service. Clean and spacious interior, lots of parking available. The setup is pretty typical, you get a large bowl you can put a bunch of ingredients in, they’ll weigh it/charge you, you pick a soup base, then they cook it for you and you can go to the bar to create your own sauces to dip in. We tried the mala (numbing spice) dry pot. It was pretty strong on the mala side but blended nicely with all the other sauce options. You can ask for rice too. The veggies, meat and carbs were cooked well. Drinks were pretty cheap. Lots of bang for your buck when you split the bill with family and friends. Highly recommend and would...