About

Working from her kitchen in north-west London, Mama Lan offers a variety of home-cooked Beijing and northern Chinese style food in an intimate supper club setting.

As well as a three course meal each evening, Mama Lan will be cooking live to show you some of the traditional techniques, handed down from generation to generation, which have been used to prepare your meal.

Hopefully the ‘show’ will inspire you to have a go at home and of course get your taste buds going on the night!

Mama Lan’s menu changes frequently and will be published a few days before the evening. With space for only 12 covers make sure you confirm your bookings in advanced!

Read more about how this got started in my first ever blog post!

History

Ning Ma, aka Mama Lan Jr

Born in Beijing and having spent most of her childhood there, Ning Ma is the driving force behind Mama Lan. Ning’s family has been in the food business for generations and to this day, Ning proudly describes how her Chef father cooked for Chinese VIPs while she was growing up. Yet when Ning thinks of good, homey food, it is her mother’s recipes and traditional cooking that she thinks of.

In 1998 and at age fifteen, Ning followed her family to London and was exposed to many cultures, widely different from her own. She went on to study at the London School of Economics and to pursue an accounting career at PricewaterhouseCoopers, before working for a well-known private equity firm.

Throughout this entire time, Ning held on to her love of food and in particular Northern Chinese cuisine and culture. While living in London, Ning was surprised to realise that most Chinese restaurants offered food widely different to what she was used to. She recognised this highly commercialised cuisine as a westernised version of Cantonese cooking and soon realised that Londoners, with their sophisticated palettes, were utterly unaware of the kind of home-cooked food she had grown up on. And that is when she decided to offer her own unique proposition to the London restaurant scene.

Named after her mother, Mama Lan aspires to introduce to its clientele the rich flavours and textures of the orient in a way rarely seen outside of China. Ning is truly passionate about both her cooking and her mother’s recipes, and one can taste that passion in the meticulously prepared meals served at Mama Lan. Taking this opportunity to work with her mother, you may well see the original Mama Lan drop in at Ning’s personal invitation, ensuring even further the authenticity of the recipes used and the adherence to high standards that only a mother could inspire.

Ning has worked hard to create a homey comfortable feel in her own home and is particularly insistent on placing the food in the middle of the table, to encourage the kind of sharing and socialising that is so key in Chinese culture. With her interactive demonstrations, Ning hopes to excite her diners into trying her recipes at home and to fall in love with northern Chinese cuisine in the same way she has.