Long Long Noodles
425 McArthur Ave. Unit 5, 613-741-2531, longlong-noodles.com
Prices:
most dishes between $10.99 and $16.99
Open:
Tuesday to Sunday 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., closed Monday
The most enjoyable dish that Long Long Noodles on McArthur Avenue serves has much going for it, beginning with its memorable name.
I mean, who could resist an item called Burning Noodles of Yibin? That goes double for yours truly, whose sheltered life was distinguished, in part, by having never tried Burning Noodles of Yibin.
Before I ordered what seems to be the only rendition of Burning Noodles of Yibin available in Ottawa, I went to the web for some information to assuage my burning curiosity. Yibin is a city in Sichuan, China, and the experts who blog or make YouTube videos about its eponymous noodle dish say that it is defined by its use of “Yibin’s famous preserved mustard-stem pickle, yacai,” crushed, toasted nuts and an “intriguing” and “elusive” sauce. (Thanks, blog.themalamarket.com .)
With that primer in mind, I felt confident placing my online order for Burning Noodles of Yibin from Long Long Noodles. I also threw in a batch of other dishes, from dumplings to snacks to stir-fries — all the better to take the overall measure of the tiny place in Vanier South, which is geared to takeout and which I only stumbled across last week because it sits next door to one of the modest Somali eateries that I reviewed last month.
But I’ve strayed from discussing those noodles, which came in their plastic container with their components separated, awaiting a good stir. The mix of wheat noodles, nuts, sesame paste, pork, vegetables and mystery sauce was very good. Calling it “burning” is a bit of poetic licence, but it was pleasantly spicy and complex of flavour.
I was reminded a bit of the noodle dish I like so much at Sula Wok on Main Street, the Guilin Noodles made by chef Sula herself as a tasty tribute to her hometown in China. I wondered momentarily if Guilin and Yibin were in close proximity, but it turns out they’re separated by about a 10-hour car ride. So much for my knowledge of Chinese geography.
All that to say, I don’t think I’ve had my last Burning Noodles of Yibin.
After inquiring, I learned that Long Long Noodles’s chef and owner, Liwei Chu, is not from Yibin, but rather is from Tianjin, near Beijing, in the northeast of China. No matter — his restaurant, which he opened in May 2018, serves dishes that Chu learned to make during his travels in his homeland, says his sister-in-law, Grace Chen, who helps out at the restaurant.
I can also recommend Chu’s versions of Sichuanese dishes, including a sour beef soup, which teemed with meat morsels, enoki mushrooms and strips of bean curd, and which apparently draws a lot of its potent flavour from pickled vegetables and white pepper. One thing I will note, though, is that the photo of the soup on Long Long’s website shows hot and sour soup, while sour beef soup turns out to look, and taste, very different.
Chu also makes a tasty, if quite salty, Sichuan fish-flavoured shredded pork (the name actually refers to a sweet-spicy preparation for fish applied to pork), as well as dry pot orders that can be made with enough chili powder to evoke Sichuan’s fearsome reputation for spiciness. That said, the shrimp in our dry pot were a little overcooked.
I’ve also tried some of Long Long’s smaller items, including dumplings, both steamed and pan-fried, that had fine savoury fillings of shrimp or pork, and somewhat thicker skins. Chu also makes steamed rice rolls stuffed with shrimp or beef, which are simply home-y Cantonese dim sum favourites that need soy sauce to liven things up.
From the menu’s deep-fried offerings, we also ordered chicken wings, which demonstrated again that the photos on the eatery’s website might not be bang-on. The online image showed 10 chicken wings for the amazing price of $3.49. We came down to earth when we opened a small bag and extracted two admittedly very good wings.
Chu’s eclecticism also prompts him to offer beef noodle soup in the style of the legendary bowls from Lanzhou in northwestern China, as well as a gluten-free variation made with rice noodles. I did not try those soups. Nor did I try the crowd-pleasers such as General Tso’s chicken, moo shu pork or springs rolls, because, you know, Burning Noodles of Yibin.
Long Long is not licensed. But it does sell bubble tea and milk tea, which emerged from Taiwan to take the world by storm.
Apart from the revelation that I like Burning Noodles of Yibin, the moral of my discovery at Long Long Noodles is that we should seek out regional culinary specialties in whatever unlikely places we find them. Who knows when we’ll next be on planes, dashing off for culinary vacations? Until then, those evocations of elsewhere are only a mouse click and car ride away.
