If you’re looking to impress a four-year-old, or a TikTok influencer (or, God forbid, a four-year-old TikTok influencer), have I got the restaurant, and the dish, for you! At Mabu Cafe, a new Hong Kong-style diner in Chinatown, you’ll find a dessert that’s served in a miniature bathtub. The bathtub itself is not edible, to the disappointment of my own four-year-old (who does not, as far as I know, have a TikTok account), nor is it yours to take home. But everything that goes in it is: an adorable, finely rendered Teddy bear, made of frozen coconut milk, and a colorful assortment of treats, including grass-jelly cubes, sago pearls, and taro balls. Give Teddy a soak in more coconut milk, poured from an accompanying pitcher, and enjoy.
The bathing bear is the tip of an iceberg of gimmicks at Mabu. For another dessert, white bunnies, made of firm, creamy milk pudding, are contained on a plate by a tiny plastic picket fence, with crushed peanuts playing the part of gravel. For a tom yum goong soup, crimped strands of instant ramen overflow dramatically out of a ceramic mug reminiscent of a Nissin Cup Noodles. “Get your camera ready!” I heard one woman urge another, as her phone pinged to let her know that she’d reached the top of the digital wait list, which tends to run long. When a server told me that the bathroom was “through the refrigerator,” I thought he was joking. But there on the edge of the basement dining room was what appeared to be a pale-blue Smeg fridge, of a theme with the retro décor (shelves lined with old thermoses and typewriters) and the vintage Chinese soaps on TV. The Smeg door, which was covered in magnets, unlatched to reveal a toilet.
I’ve never been to Hong Kong, where the diner culture is legendary, but I get the feeling that anyone seeking the moving target known as authenticity from Mabu, which is an outpost of a Toronto restaurant, will be disappointed. One day at lunch, a couple at a neighboring table—residents of San Francisco who had spent time in Hong Kong—quibbled with certain aspects of one of the menu’s cheesy baked bread bowls, which are stuffed with things such as creamy curry chicken or Bolognese, plus a choice of spaghetti, macaroni, or rice. Still, the restaurant is a good introduction to the general concept of Hong Kong’s cha chaan teng, which translates literally to “tea restaurants.” These offer, in addition to tea (and especially milk tea, which is exactly what it sounds like), what you might call mid-century Western cuisine modified for a Cantonese palate, a collision of sensibilities with some zany results.
The most delicious dishes I ate at Mabu fell pretty squarely on the Asian end of the spectrum: a bowl of chewy instant noodles topped with chicken, scallion oil, and a fried egg; sweet, sticky morsels of barbecued pork on a bed of lard-slicked rice; a neat stack of steamed choy sum, a Chinese-broccoli-adjacent green, in a glossy drizzle of oyster sauce; bouncy fish balls in a curry sauce. But I was charmed by the “Grills in Hot Plate” section of the menu, featuring sizzling cast-iron plates encircled by what look like soda-jerk-style paper crowns and piled with combinations such as a fried pork chop with sausage, macaroni, corn, grilled onion, and sliced tomato, and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed a comforting casserole of rice, beef, tomato, onion, and corn, blanketed in melted cheese.
If you’re older than four, with no desire to go viral, instead of bears or bunnies for dessert, you might prefer a crackly-topped pineapple bun, sliced crosswise and stuffed with a scoop of vanilla ice cream or, better yet, a fat slab of butter. I myself went crazy for something called a Dirty Caramel Cookie Cream Bun: a soft, slightly crusty roll sandwiching gobs of luscious cookie-butter pastry cream and crushed Biscoff, then coated in more crushed Biscoff, wonderful and wacky. (Dishes $6.99-$26.99.) ♦
An earlier version of this article misidentified a dish in an image.