YGF MaLaTang Bellevue — Restaurant in Bellevue

14.99 per pound, but the bowl you use to put the food in is also weighted as apart with or along with the food so a bit deceiving there... please correct or subtract the bowl weight from the food.

No seating and overcrowded please manage your restaurant organizations. I feel like any incident could have taken place at anytime and would cause an OSHA case if it was ever reported. Especially if you have no more seating please make sure to have a line for people to wait outside or be in line for next available seating instead of having an uncontrolled environment of people standing everywhere in people's way when this is a restaurant experience not an outdoor eating area like the mall or open field!

No Service, I get it with the understaffing situation, but not an excuse to not develop a system to control the environment. It would definitely be a better experience for newcomers trying out the restaurant (saw a couple of families with kids walked off because of how chaotic and unsafe the environment was for them and their young ones)

Horrible sliding door for the fridge to grab ingredients. Please make a rule to allow one person at a time to grab food. I got hit a few times by the sliding fridge door because there were no rules in place for other people to follow suit and opening the fridge door on the end hitting my tonsil and plate... almost dropped all of my ingredients because of it.

I would love to give this place another try and recommend the people in my circle, but if it's gonna be the same experience (I thought since this is a smaller hotpot restaurant it would be a smoother experience I am wrong).. I would recommend to give other Hotpot restaurants like Happy Lamb, La MA Tou, Boiling Point, and Liuoysho Hotpot a go instead... although bigger and busier and longer wait time they have a system present and in place to make the experience safe for their clientele which is a huge difference in any restaurant business small or large...

Your experience:

You walk in, stomach grumbling, hungry, hopeful that you will find a nourishing, spicy and tasty meal with a variety of additions. You creak the door open, ready to see what the restaurant is on offer.

You grab a not-entirely-clear bowl and a pair of not-entirely-pristine tongs. You walk over to the giant refrigerators holding a variety of foods. As you peer down into the depths of a veritable half-frozen wet-market of raw meat and raw vegetables jumbled haphazardly together like a toddler's first set of building blocks, your stomach churns. You see a piece of beef waylaid into the cabbage. You see a piece of tripe waylaid into a tray of bok choy.

You hope that the soup is boiling hot enough to keep E. coli and whatever new menagerie of bacterial overlords at bay. Powering through, you slap your food onto a scale, weighed wholesale. The swiveling payment ipad is shown to you, with tip options. You note that this entire place is self-serve.

And yet you still tipped them somehow. What did you tip for? There was no service. You were ushered to a cramped table next to the front door, where you sit at exactly eye-level with the butts of all the customers pushing into the shop.

Your food arrives, and it's fine. Nothing special. "soup's ok" you think to yourself. The door opens. A strong gust blows in along with more customers and their butts at your eye level. Out of the corner of your eye, a gremlin shoves through the line with its parents and you see something spill onto the floor. A worker comes out and attempts to mop it up, just to push it under the refrigerator.

You lose most of your appetite. You grab a to-go box and by the time you're back, they've already started wiping your table, erasing any signs of your existence.

You drive home with your rapidly cooling slop, filled with regret and maybe the first pangs of a stomach cramp warning you to find a porcelain throne soon.

1/10 would not...

We stopped by this place for lunch at around noon. There were tongs and bowls right at the door. They offered variety of vegetables, mushrooms, meat, seafood and many kind of noodles, and even duck blood. After picking the food, you could choose with broth or dry, weigh and pay by lb. Mine was 1.5 lbs and I couldn’t even finish. I chose only one of each. My husband bowl was 2.3 lbs and it was barely any broth.

We both got beef broth with level 3 spicy. The broth had good favor but little too salty for me. Spicy level was good and not too crazy for me at level 3. There was a sauce area which was kinda nice but the soup was too salty to use the sauce. I was kinda concerned about freshness of food in fridge. It seemed it wasn’t cold enough. Some of the meat are placed right at the fridge door. And because the place was so busy so it seemed like the door was never closed.

After sitting down, the place got really busy. People were waiting to get food and then there were people were waiting to get the table. Wondering what if their food was ready and didn’t even have the table. Also, It was very hard to hear when they called that the food was ready. I hope they have a different system for it. Overall, it was nice to try but not worthy...