Ma Bo

My wife and adult son came here for dinner. The restaurant looked poorly decorated and shabby but there were many Chinese people eating there. Three lads who were leaving the restaurant had said the food was «sound» so we decided to stay. We asked to use the toilet before we sat down and were shown the way down a dark corridor and through a back kitchen and down some outside steps and down a dilapidated yard to a derelict outhouse where the urinal was screwed to an outside wall. We didn’t stay.

The restaurant needs a good coat of paint and décor. The menus were very old, dirty and falling apart. The food was ok but nothing special. I was amazed that the men’s room is an outhouse with no door or running water. There is a faucet but it is to cold and pipes could freeze and rupture.

This is one of the best Chinese restaurants in the city — although you wouldn’t bloody think it to look at it!
Ma Bo’s is, probably like all the restaurants along Chinatown, a very family orientated restaurant, this place just feels it more then most — the fact that granny sits in the corner telling off her children helps.
To describe its décor as simple would be too simple, I can’t imagine that the place has had a lick of paint since 1964 but the aquamarine walls and fading Chinese prints only add to a surreal timeless quality like it belongs in the Paris of a Bertolucci film — the music when I was here was great, some sort of 60s Chinese stuff, not your usual stereotypical muzak!
What I mean is that even going to the toilet is a bit of an adventure and feels like you have been transported to the clutterred hillsides of Hong Kong. I came with my family and once my Da and I had ventured through the tiny kitchen, along the narrow dark passageway out back and to the outhouse, there was no way my mother would leave her table!
But it just adds to the sensation that you’re round at someone’s house which can only be a nice dining experience. The fact that I noticed lots of other Chinese eating here could say a lot about the place.