About

On these recipe pages you’ll find the inspiration and information you need to cook with the Sichuan ingredients we import for The Mala Market. We are Taylor Holliday and Fongchong Havighurst, and our mother-daughter venture began with this blog, which we started in 2014 to document our adventures in learning to cook Sichuan food in America.

One of us joined a new family in the U.S. at age 11 and refused to eat anything but real Chinese food, and the other one had to learn in a hurry how to cook it for her. We discovered through the years that the secret to making food that tastes like it would in China is using the same ingredients that are used in China. By 2017 the two of us were traveling to China regularly to source Sichuan heritage products—most of which had never been available before in the U.S.—and share them with other home cooks (and not a few chefs) back home.

Taylor, a former arts and travel journalist (WSJ, NYT), is CEO, importer, cook and writer, and Fongchong, now a university student, is fulfillment manager, translator and chief taster. Our shared obsession with málà—Sichuan’s numbing and spicy cuisine—helped us bond as mother and daughter all those years ago and still keeps Fongchong connected to her homeland. Over the years, we’ve also invited several other mother-daughter teams to join us in sharing recipes from their families’ home regions.

Whether your connection to Chinese food is through your immigrant or multicultural family, world travel, or simply the love of a Chinese restaurant down the street, the mission of both our store and blog is to help you make the best Chinese of your life!