La Noodle
179 George St., Unit 102, 613-216-9028, lanoodle.ca
Open: 11:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily
Prices: soups and noodle dishes $8.95 to $12.95, cold dishes and appetizers $3.95 to $8.95
Access: no steps to front door, washrooms
According to Chinese superstition, you should eat noodles to mark Chinese New Year this weekend, and the longer the noodles, the better.
The reason, if you can use that word to support a superstition, is that noodles symbolize long life.
My advice to the superstitious, then, is to head to La Noodle, which opened in Lowertown in mid-October, at the foot of a high-rise at George and Cumberland streets. (A second La Noodle opened in Kanata Centrum earlier this week.)
To be clear, La Noodle doesn’t serve French pasta, although its name suggests it might. Instead, it’s a far-flung franchise — the sole one in Canada, apparently — of a Chinese business with roots in the northwestern Chinese city of Lanzhou, renowned in culinary terms for its noodles.
Those noodles are known as lamian, and if it helps, you could think of them as the older, more rustic cousin of ramen. The key thing about lamian, in China and at La Noodle, is that the noodles are freshly made by hand, with an expert chef twisting, stretching, folding and pulling a blob of dough until it’s manipulated into strands of noodles that match a customer’s ordered thickness. Then the noodles are cooked and wind up in soup that relies on powdered bases sent from China, plus water and beef or pork bones.
La Noodle is the first lamian eatery in Ottawa, and at the cheap and casual 40-seat restaurant with blocky wooden tables, you can catch a glimpse of the chef working behind the cash area if you position yourself properly. You might wonder why its owners aren’t making a bigger visual deal about the unique noodle-making. After all, there’s a set piece in a Jackie Chan movie in which Chan, not fighting or running for a change, demonstrates his prowess at lamian noodle-making. Perhaps naively, I wish there was a noodle cam at La Noodle that broadcasted the chef’s exploits to TV screens in the dining room.
If you could snag a perfect view of the noodle-making, it would look like this:
Over three visits, friends and I have explored as best we could the menu of about 10 appetizers and 16 soups, offered in medium or large sizes and generally distinguished by the kind of meat they included. We’ve been frustrated at times because certain items haven’t been available. I still have to try the spicy Szechuan dandan noodles with pork and peanut sauce here — they were out the three times I requested them.
What we did sample were hearty but well-made dishes with authentic, big and even brusque flavours. The big caveat is that if you’re seeking nicely trimmed, fat-, bone- and gristle-free pieces of beef, pork or lamb in your soup, La Noodle is not that kind of restaurant. More refined, and pricier, Asian soups are to be had elsewhere.
Of the starters, we most enjoyed dry tofu in chili oil, which consisted of resilient, noodle-like strands of bean curd skin, swimming in a spicy but not incendiary oil. Seaweed salad was a similarly textured treat, but flecked with pungent raw garlic.
Tofu with chili oil at La Noodle
Seaweed salad at La Noodle
For an intrepid eater, a braised pig’s foot, which can also be ordered in soup, was a fall-apart mess studded with flavourful meat. Steamed chicken in chili oil was generously portioned but the steaming had happened some time ago so that the chunks of bone-in chicken were cold and tough.
Simmered pig’s feet at La Noodle
Steamed chicken in chili oil at La Noodle
The signature soups here are beef-based, in keeping with precursors in Lanzhou that go back more than 130 years. The so-called traditional soup featured thinly sliced beef, which was gristle-flecked. I’m prefer the slightly pricier soup with braised beef which was usually succulent, if fatty or membraned. With both soups, the stock was robust, the herbal hits were appreciated and slabs of daikon filled things out.
Traditional beef noodle soup at La Noodle
Braised beef soup at La Noodle
The lamb soup featured slices of gamy, fatty lamb and a less intense broth. The pork bone broth soup was my least favourite, with a broth that appealed less and had a pig’s-leg joint with scant bits of meat on it.
Lamb and noodle soup at La Noodle
Pork bone broth noodle soup at La Noodle
Beef and pickled cabbage soup at La Noodle
Fresh and toothsome, the noodles in every bowl lived up to their billing in the restaurant’s name. As for the seven choices of noodle sizes from about an inch wide to angel’s hair, just know that the bigger the noodles, the more chewing you’ll do. For what it’s worth, a friend who has friends from Lanzhou told me they like the thinnest noodles because they absorb more flavour from the broth and can be melt-in-the-mouth good.
If chewing is your thing, you can also opt for the chunkier, sliced noodles, whittled from a hunk of dough into boiling water and then added to soup.
Customers can bolster their soup with a smoky chili sauce at their tables or an optional, soy-and-spice-marinated, hard-boiled egg.
The restaurant is unlicensed and there are no desserts available beyond bubble tea. But you didn’t come to La Noodle for booze or a sugar fix, which in any case wouldn’t do a thing for your longevity.
phum@postmedia.com
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