South Bay: Ma's Restaurant

Before landing in CA Saturday afternoon, we'd already decided to take our close family friend out for dinner to thank her for looking after our 4 dogs while we were gone. She was crazy enough to take almost an entire week off from work just to do it.

As usual, picking a place to eat was a feat in itself. After a lot of hemming and hawing, we finally went to our family's go-to Chinese restaurant (the only thing my mom insisted on having was noodles):

Ma's Restaurant is located super close to where I live and serves pretty decent Chinese food. Plus it has all-you-can-eat soft-serve!

Our meal started with a dish of peanuts:

For the four of us, our server recommended we order the 4-5 person dinner set. It had most of the dishes we usually like to order anyway, so we went with that even though we knew there would be a lot leftover.

First came the sour cabbage beef soup:

I usually prefer the sour cabbage and lamb combination, but because my ahyi doesn't like lamb, we switched it up for her.

One of my favorites is the big bing:

The dinner set originally came with green onion pancakes, but we replaced it with this because it's so much better. The bing is crunchy on the outside, but soft on the inside. It comes hot from the kitchen and unlike at other restaurants, Ma's makes theirs with plenty of green onion and just enough salt.

Another of my favorites is the hand cut noodle:

We chose the combination, which included pork, chicken, and shrimp.

Next came the fish:

And the lamb with green onion:

That was the one dish we couldn't compromise on. Sorry, ahyi. Lamb is just better.

And finally the edamame with tofu skin and pickled potherb mustard (or xue cai as it's called in Chinese):



I usually love this stuff, but it was a bit too salty for me this time.

Overall, a very filling...too filling meal. Too bad my sister wasn't around to share it.

Ma's Restaurant

1715 Lundy Ave

San Jose, CA 95131

(408) 437-2499