Ma’s House

Although there are multiple Orange County restaurants (including Dolan’s and Taibat) offering Islamic Chinese meals today, this specific Chinese variation wasn’t well-known at all in the 1970s, when the Ma family first began serving the cuisine in Los Angeles County. Even by the 1990s, when daughter Jamillah Ma opened Jamillah Garden in Tustin (since closed), the cuisine was still a local rarity, eventually spawning Anaheim’s Mas’ Chinese Islamic Restaurant in the mid-2000s, Ma’s House in Laguna Hills in 2017, and another same-named San Diego location in 2019. Today, all three of these places operate under the Ma’s House name, collectively proclaiming “over half a century” of service in Southern California – fair, though the chain’s history isn’t so linear.

With a dome on its roof, a gigantic chandelier-topped fountain in its foyer, and a huge sign outside the castle-like wooden front door, the Anaheim location makes a strong visual impression before you even set foot in its dining room. That space is divided into two areas: a fairly large, plain box with nested banquet tables, plus a smaller corridor directly accessible from the kitchen. Servers routinely move through the corridor with vapor-trailing plates of sizzling black pepper beef ($19.50), and actively tend to guests throughout their meals, handling everything from initial orders to packaging up leftovers with genuine smiles.

One surprise about Ma’s menu is how much it initially looks like one from any old school Chinese-American restaurant – apart from the absence of pork, a non-halal meat, the hundred-plus choices cover highly familiar ground across fried rice ($14 to $15.50), chow mein/chow fun ($15 to $18), vegetable ($15 to $19), poultry ($16.50 to $23), beef ($19.50 to $39) and seafood ($20.50 to $39.50) dishes, with lunch specials starting at $14.50. But there are clear signs of unique options if you look for them: “home-style noodles” in chow mein ($16.50 to $17), seven lamb dishes ($20 to $24), appetizers and cold dishes ($7 to $17) including cold spicy ox tripe, and multiple ways to order ox tail and ox meatloaf (haslets), including soup ($16.50), noodle soup ($18.50 to $21.50), warm pots ($29 to $40 for six to eight people), or as a stir-fried entree with brown sauce ($39). Drink options ($1.75 to $6) are extremely limited, focusing solely on sodas, hot or iced teas, boba teas, boba coffee, and bottled water; we’d recommend choosing one, as the Anaheim location’s tap water didn’t taste great.

To give some of the specialties at Ma’s House a very light workout, we focused on four dishes that it’s either well-known for or somewhat uniquely offering locally, starting with its traditional sesame bread with green onion ($17.50) – one of three sesame breads on offer. The thin version of this bread arrives as a large, pre-sliced stack with enough pieces to feed a small army, each softer than one might expect from the sesame seed top crust, and less sharp in flavor than expected from the copious thin-sliced green onions; a thicker, more cake-like version is around twice as tall, and a second thin version uses red bean paste rather than onions. Unless you’re dining with a group of six to eight people, or not ordering much else as your meal, expect to take some bread home.