A love letter,
in a bowl.
She grew up in China eating malatang at street corners after school. Bowls bigger than her head, steam fogging her glasses, the comforting numb tingle of Sichuan peppercorn. Then life took her abroad, and the one thing she couldn't find anywhere was that taste.
So her husband went looking for it. He spent two years travelling to the places that knew malatang best: Chongqing back alleys, Chengdu night markets, villages in the Yunnan mountains. He sat with grandmothers who shared their spice mixes. He watched pots that had been going for decades.
Happy Pot started in their kitchen. What began as one person cooking for one person turned into a counter where a few hundred people, every week, get to eat the same thing she grew up with.
We still source from the twelve regions he first visited. We still press our own chili oil. The broth still simmers overnight. And every bowl still gets built by hand, because that's the part that actually matters.