Stanford students craving Chinese-American cuisine now have a new dining option nearby: Mamahuhu, located in Town & Country (855 El Camino Real, Suite 75, Palo Alto). The restaurant opened its doors in mid-September.
Mamahuhu aims to blend Chinese flavors with American taste while bucking stereotypes of unhealthy, low-quality food, according to co-founder Anmao Sun.
“The whole idea is based around how we take these classic Chinese-American dishes that we all know — the sweet and sour chicken and the beef and broccoli — and we take an approach where we focus on ingredients [and] focus on technique,” Sun said.
The Town & Country location marks Mamahuhu’s fourth restaurant in the Bay Area. The chain opened its first San Francisco location in January 2020, followed by two additional restaurants in 2022, one in Marin County and another in San Francisco.
Wanting to establish their restaurant in a new part of the Bay, Mamahuhu’s team was drawn to the street-like atmosphere of Town & Country’s colonnades. “We like that feeling, with a lot of the bustle and energy, but it’s also in a very, very well-run, very established, very put-together development,” Sun said.
Mamahuhu’s ethos is rooted in a culinary culture that has evolved from the adaptation of a variety of regional Chinese cuisines to American palates since Chinese immigration to the U.S. began in the 1800s — “product-market fit,” Sun called it.
When Sun, a Massachusetts native, traveled and lived in Shanghai, he found himself longing for Chinese-American dishes that were nowhere to be found. “Sweet and sour chicken — like no one in China knows what that is,” Sun said. “Doesn’t exist.”
While working in Shanghai’s food industry, Sun met Ben Moore, another American expat who grew up on Chinese-American cuisine and had a passion for quality ingredients. The two eventually met Brandon Jew, an acclaimed San Francisco chef, and the trio brought their dream of quality Chinese-American food to the Bay.
According to Sun, quality doesn’t just mean swapping ingredients like cane sugar for pineapple in the sweet and sour chicken. It’s also about creating vegetarian dishes that stand on their own and reimagining classics like beef and broccoli with a greater focus on fresh vegetables.
Sun noted that business has been “growing steadily” in its early weeks, with students from both Stanford and Palo Alto High School coming for lunch. “We feel the community here has been very supportive so far,” Sun said.
“I think it is a nice addition to Town & Country,” Daniel Rashes ’26, who visited Mamahuhu with friends in early October, said.
Rashes and his friends enjoyed their order of sweet and sour chicken, M.S.G. chicken and broccoli beef, though the latter was less popular. Still, Rashes appreciated Mamahuhu filling the gap in Chinese-American fast-casual food in the Bay Area. “I would definitely go back,” he said.
Like the other locations, Sun hopes the new restaurant will serve as a community space across the Stanford area. The Palo Alto location will host its first mahjong night on Nov. 10, where they’ll bring professional mahjong teacher Dinna Davis to introduce the popular Chinese game to newcomers.
Weston Keller ’27, who learned mahjong from Davis last summer and is now an avid player, plans on attending the event at Mamahuhu and assisting in game instruction.
“It makes for great banter and laughs with friends when you’re both waiting for one last tile to win,” Keller wrote in an email to The Daily. “I hope to see lots of Stanford folks at Mamahuhu to play.”