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What comes to mind when you think of Chinese American cuisine? Perhaps vibrant red sweet-and-sour chicken or stir-fried broccoli and beef. Likely, it’s something you wouldn’t consider to be all that healthy.
But at Mamahuhu, the newest restaurant to come to Palo Alto’s Town & Country Village, a Michelin-starred chef is breathing new life into these tried and true dishes. Using transparent sourcing, high-quality ingredients and refined cooking approaches, the fast-casual restaurant aims to make Chinese American cuisine a cuisine you can feel good about eating.
“What we’re hoping to achieve is really to get people feeling very, very excited about Chinese American cuisine again – and I say again, because we recognize that this is not a new cuisine,” co-founder Ben Moore said.
While Moore is not Chinese American, the New York native is fluent in Mandarin and lived in Shanghai for seven years, creating a farm-to-table restaurant chain there with business partner Anmao Sun. On a trip to San Francisco, the pair dined at Michelin-starred Mister Jiu’s, where chef-owner Brandon Jew serves Chinese food with California influence.
“We’re aligned in terms of our food values,” Moore said of Jew. “Brandon cares a ton about the ingredients he uses and thinks about things from a sustainability and an environmental point of view.”
The trio all grew up on Chinese American food, which Moore defined as “Chinese cooking techniques adapted to the American palate.” Distinct from food found in China, Moore described Chinese American food as a cuisine born of Chinese immigrants using ingredients more commonly found in America, such as broccoli, and flavors more suited to American tastebuds, including fried, sweeter and more colorful foods.
“People love (Chinese American cuisine), but there’s also this reputation that is a bit negative in some ways, where people think, ‘Oh, it’s cheap and greasy. It’s sort of a guilty pleasure. I can eat it, but I don’t feel very good after,’” Moore said. “A lot of people view it as a lower-quality food, which is obviously something we don’t believe to be true.”
The business partners recognized that there hadn’t been any major upgrades to Chinese American food since its inception, Moore said, so they decided to take their own food ethos and apply it to the cuisine. In 2020, they opened the first Mamahuhu in San Francisco.
“The basic concept was to take these classic dishes and flavors and reinvigorate them, and to do it in a way that felt more modern and contemporary,” Moore said.
The most popular dish on the menu is Mamahuhu’s sweet-and-sour chicken ($18), made without processed sugars or food coloring. Instead, the dish is made with honey and organic pineapple juice for sweetness, tomato paste for red color and hawthorn berry for tang. The M.S.G. chicken ($18) doesn’t have monosodium glutamate, but rather a house seasoning of mushroom, seaweed and garlic.
Many meat-based dishes on the menu have a vegetarian counterpart, with options such as sweet-and-sour cauliflower, mushroom mapo tofu and broccoli and mushroom ($16-$17).
“We didn’t want it to have it to be like, ‘our entrees are these four or five dishes and they’re all meat-based,’ and then if you’re a vegetarian, you can get this one thing,” Moore said. “We want it to be like every delicious thing that we offer, there’s a meat version and there’s an equally important and equally delicious vegetarian version.”
Salads aren’t common in Chinese American cuisine, Moore noted, but Mamahuhu’s menu offers two, including the chrysanthemum salad ($11) with chrysanthemum leaves and smoked tofu.
The pineapple bun chicken sandwiches ($13-$14) come in three flavors (honey hawthorn, tingly spicy and super savory) and are served on Hong Kong-style pineapple buns, which are light and fluffy with a mildly sweet cookie crumble top.
For dessert, find four flavors of chop suey sundaes ($4-$7.50), made with dairy-free banana soft serve. These sundaes are an homage to ice cream sundaes topped with candied fruit, chopped nuts and syrups. Mamahuhu tops its sundaes with boba, mango sago, red bean or malty Ovaltine.
Mamahuhu Palo Alto will offer in-person and kiosk ordering and about 50 seats between its indoor and outdoor areas. The walls are decorated with two paintings of horses and and two paintings of tigers, an homage to its name, a colloquialism which translates literally to “horse-horse tiger-tiger) in Mandarin.
“The definition is a little bit squirrely, to be honest, but it kind of means ‘so-so, something a bit imperfect, not quite this, not quite that, a little bit meh,’” Moore said.
Moore and his business partners chose the name to be fun and light-hearted, as well as to express humility often found in Chinese culture. The name also draws a parallel between Moore’s experience learning Chinese language versus how Chinese is actually spoken in China with Chinese food found in America versus Chinese food in China. He recalled learning the word mamahuhu early on and assumed it was a common word.
“I found it hilarious when I moved to China and realized that this word is just very uncommonly used,” he said. “If you go to China, the food that we’re serving here, they also would be like, ‘What is this? We don’t actually serve that very much.’”
Moore said that as long as Mamahuhu continues to do well, he plans to continue to expand the business.
Mamahuhu, 855 El Camino Real, Suite 75, Palo Alto; 650-494-4643, Instagram: @eatmamahuhu. Open daily from 11:30 a.m. to 9 p.m.
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