Le Mien
43 William St., 613-421-8882, lemiencraftnoodle.com
Open: Weekdays 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., Saturday and Sunday 11:30 a.m. to 9 p.m.
Prices: soups $11 to $15
Access: No steps to front door or washroom
In French, “le mien” means mine. But as is immediately apparent at Le Mien Craft Noodle in the ByWard Market, the words signify something completely different in Chinese.
Allow me to take a liberty or two and translate — Lā in Mandarin means “to pull or stretch.” Miàn means “noodle.”
But you may have already gleaned that by watching Le Mien’s noodle-meisters through the small, narrow eatery’s front window as they speedily transform blobs of well-prepared dough into toothsome noodles of varying thicknesses by pulling, twisting and looping the dough between their flexing arms.
In a transfixing piece of culinary sleight of hand, a Le Mien cook can take less than half a minute to send instantly made noodles from his floured work counter into the massive pot of boiling water to his left.
No wonder Le Mien’s noodle makers have been stationed in its front window since it opened in April, showing off their skills to passersby.
In Ottawa, Le Mien, which went in on William Street where Sash Gelato Café had been, is not first to market with hand-pulled Chinese noodles. The Chinese franchise La Noodle arrived in a less trafficked stretch of the ByWard Market two years ago, and has even spread west to Kanata Centrum and Merivale Road.
But Le Mien, which is not related to La Noodle, has the marketing edge thanks to pure showmanship and location.
So, the skillful display in Le Mien’s open kitchen both entertains and whets the appetite. But how is the food here?
The restaurant specializes fiercely, with its illustrated menu offering five noodle dishes, four of which are soups (three beef-based and one vegetarian). A flip of the page reveals 10 side dishes.
No one should leave here hungry, as the soup bowls, all priced between $11 to $15, are teeming with food and, in the case of a large-sized bowl, gargantuan and probably best shared.
This fall, I’ve tried three of the four beefy (and spicy) soups, and a few of the sides.
Starting with the smaller dishes, I can tell you that all were better than the menu photos led us to expect.
The enigmatically named sea vegetable potato silk ($2.99) was a green and sharable plate of julienned and seemingly lightly pickled potato, mixed with and made more savoury by the seaweed. It was a mild but appealing starter.
Sea vegetable potato silk at Le Mien
The so-called Chinese hamburger ($5.99) was a bit hard to extricate from the basket in which it came. But the pulled and sauced pork on a well-browned flatbread was filling and likeable.
Le Mien Craft Noodle in Ottawa Tuesday Oct 30, 2018. Chinese meat hamburger. Tony Caldwell
The dish of cold noodles with chicken shreds ($12.99) was large enough to be a must-share as a prelude to soup, or a main course on its own. While it looked like a mess in its bowl, and the noodles were long enough to require a pair of scissors to cut them down to size, the dish was potently sauced with indulgently nutty sesame paste and numbing Sichuan peppers.
Cold noodles and shredded chicken at Le Mien
The star soup at Le Mien, which it touted most prominently on the entirety of the menu’s first page, is traditional hand-pulled noodle soup with beef ($11 to $15).
Le Mien Craft Noodle in Ottawa Tuesday Oct 30, 2018. Traditional hand-pulled noodle with beef (Moxi Style) Tony Caldwell
While the menu leaves out details of the soup’s tradition, it seems to me like a spicier, earthier rendition of Lanzhou beef noodle soup, which originated in Northwestern China.
At Le Mien, the noodles were obviously fresh, springy and toothsome. The piping-hot, glasses-fogging broth, reportedly simmered for eight hours, was full-flavoured and meaty, and a good-sized dollop or two of chilli sauce added a jolt of heat. (For the heat-averse, that finishing condiment could also be omitted.) The beef in this soup consisted of fatty but flavourful slices that were more like garnishes.
In all, in terms of daunting size and flavours, Le Mien’s rustic specialty lived up to a friend’s estimate: “This is a big-boy soup,” he said, as a medium-sized bowl landed in front of him.
One variant of the soup was made almost puckeringly sour with the addition of shreds of pickled cabbage ($13.99). Another swapped out the shredded beef for randomly hacked chunks and tendons of beef, all of varying chewinesses.
Beef soup with pickled cabbage at Le Mien
Beef and tendon noodle soup at Le Mien
While Le Mien rightly stresses the craft involved in the creation of its noodles, its beef preparations are much more rustic and less concerned with sophistication or artisanality. Put another way: If the meat in these soups were also fancy, you would certainly be paying a few more dollars per bowl.
Service is quick and to the point. The eatery is not licensed.
The restaurant, which seats about 40 in close proximity to one another, has been close to full during a dinner visit and one of my lunch visits.
With the cooking on display, some pleasant décor, and large artworks of fish along one wall, Le Mien is an interesting place one step up from a hole-in-a-wall.
Lingering, however, is probably discouraged. A visit here is more about being dazzled by the magic of noodle-making, and then filling one’s belly with those noodles before venturing back into the cold.
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Peter Hum’s restaurant reviews