I love independent restaurants. I love hole in the wall restaurants. I love mom & pop places. Mama Lan ticked all the aforementioned boxes and I therefore planned to eat at this little place serving Beijing street food as soon as I saw it
Jules H joined me for dinner here over the weekend.Although there's no booking at the small restaurant, the turnover of tables is swift and we shared a larger table with some other diners
The menu is small but perfectly formed, offering some noodles soups, cold noodle salads, a variety of dumplings, small snacks like pork buns and chicken wings as well as some salads. We opted for beef noodle soup, tofu noodle soup, vegetarian dumplings (pan fried gyoza style) and pork buns
It's hard to know how to judge Mama Lan. On my visit to Beijing, I found the food generally disappointing. It was quite devoid of flavour compared to Cantonese, Sichuan and Taiwanese food. To be fair to Mama Lan, the taste reminded of the food I had eaten in Beijing but therefore, it wasn't the best
The best dish was my beef noodle soup, which had some depth to the soup with super tender pieces of slow cooked beef brisket. However, Jules's tofu noodle soup was rather flavourless. The dumplings were nice, especially when dipped into vinegar, which was supplied on the tables. However, the pork buns arrived late, just as we were about to cancel them. They're hirata open pork buns, not like the sort you'll get a dim sum. The pork was rather dry
I wanted to give the place 4 stars for being independent and different but unfortunately, the food only merits 3 stars read more