Tag Archives: noodles

Ru Yi Hand Pulled Noodle (Madison, WI)

Our next stop was a night in Minneapolis visiting with friends. Normally, if I was doing that driving route I’d usually try to stop at New Glarus Brewing, but when we passed through in June, they were still closed to the public due to the pandemic. To give ourselves a nice break from the drive, we decided to stop for lunch in Madison, Wisconsin, which has quite the selection of potential dining options. After looking at a few potential spots, we settled on Chinese, getting noodles from Ru Yi Hand Pulled Noodle on State Street.

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Anju Noodle Bar (Kittery, ME)

One of the simpler foods that I really enjoy is a good ramen noodle shop (indeed, I’ve reviewed rather a lot of them). It’s been one of the upcoming trendy foods, with ramen shops opening up all over the place, some more Japanese-inspired, some more Korean-inspired. But they are almost always tasty. But it’s also one of those trends that hasn’t really made inroads into New Hampshire yet. But it’s almost here, indeed, a recent trip to Portsmouth had us crossing over to Kittery in search of dinner, and we ended up finding Anju Noodle Bar just over the river from Portsmouth, in scenic downtown Kittery (right across from one of the entrances to the shipyard).

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Palace Saimin (Honolulu, HI)

While I’ve talked about many of the dishes that demonstrate the ethnic fusion of Hawaii, few of them embody the multicultural fusion of Hawaiian cuisine as much as “saimin”. Saimin is basically a noodle dish that is a mild fusion of elements taken from each the major cultures of Hawaii’s plantation era: Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, Hawaiian, and Portuguese. The resulting dish is a noodle soup that bears a lot of resemblance to Chinese “mein” and Japanese “ramen”, usually with some other ethnicities adding ingredients, such as Spam, gyoza, udon, or wontons. In any case, much of the Kahili neighborhood had Saimin joints popping up during the middle of the 20th century, usually run by recent Okinawan families. And pretty much everyone I know that grew up in Hawaii has told me stories about how much saimin they ate as a kid, either as soup, or as the related “fried min” (pan-fried noodles with the same sorts of toppings). Oahu has dozen of Saimin places, and one of the older, more classic, and, quite frankly, no-frills places is Palace Saimin.

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Ying Leong Look Funn Factory (Honolulu, HI)

After Liliha Bakery, our hosts with Hawaii Food Tours took us to central Chinatown for a nice sampling of the various food establishments there. Probably the high point of the visit was them taking us to a fairly subtle store front on the Kekaulike Market: the Ying Leong Look Funn Factory, for a look at making fresh rice noodles. Walking inside, it’s less like walking into a store than, well, a factory, and you pretty much walk right into the noodle production line. They are making fresh funn, the wide sheets of glutinous rice flour noodles that are one of my favorite noodles from Chinese cooking. When fresh, these are always wonderfully toothsome, stretchy, and tender all at the same time, and they do a great job soaking up sauces. Here at the Ying Leong Look Funn Factory, you can see them being made.

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Shoryu (Soho, London, UK)

The next day in London, we decided to go on a walking tour of the London Underground from London Walks, which was a rather insightful romp through Baker Street, King’s Cross, Covent Garden, Leicester Square, Embankment, and Westminster Tube stations, and one I highly recommend. But at the end of our tour, we found ourselves by Piccadilly Circus and hungry for lunch. With the fond memories of our trip to Bone Daddies still fresh in our head, we were again hungry for Ramen. This time we checked out Shoryu, who has one location a short walk from the Circus.

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Bone Daddies (Soho, London, UK)

Since my last visit to London, a new ramen shop has opened up in Soho, and it’s been getting a lot of coverage in the various review sites, like TimeOut London. I always like a good ramen joint (heck, I found a truly excellent one hiding in Canton, MI), and while there are several decently-rated ramen joints in London still on my hit list, after reading Krista’s review of Bone Daddies on Passport Delicious, I decided to bump it up to the top of the list, especially after hearing how much she enjoyed the eggs.

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Restaurant Nu-Do (Montreal, QC)

For me, one of the great enjoyments I have with Asian cooking is when I can find a place with hand-pulled noodles. Unfortunately, these aren’t terribly common, especially in the hinterlands of Northern New England (indeed, I’m not sure we have any places that do this, although I’d be delighted to be proven wrong). A good bowl of hand-pulled noodles, especially in a rich, flavorful soup, is a wonderful combination of tastes and textures. Luckily, Montreal has more than a few noodle shops, and one of the newer ones in Chinatown, Nu-do, is another branch of the already well-regarded Nu-do of Eaton Center, and the related Yuki Ramen in Faubourg Ste-Catherine (is there anything decent but Yuki still left in the Faubourg, now that Faubourg Bagels has departed?). So when we were looking for an interesting dinner, we grabbed Rick, Sarah, and Nancy, and walked down to Chinatown. Nu-do is the exact sort of place. It’s been around a while, but they still haven’t invested in permanent signage; the restaurant is labeled with a simple reinforced nylon banner labeling the place as “Restaurant Nudo”, with the “Nudo” obscured by the unsecured corner of the banner. But don’t let the dubious signage discourage you: after heading down a short staircase, you find yourself in a fairly spacious dining room, with a glass wall looking into the noodle cooking station, with the noodle-puller hard at work pulling ribbons of noodle for each order as they come in.

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Noodle Station (Reykjavik, Iceland)

Our last full day in Iceland was mostly spent tooling around Reykjavik. In the morning, we spent most of our time in Reykjavik’s heated pool, Laugardalslaug, which was nice (but wasn’t conducive to cameras…) Afterward, we wandered around downtown again. One place we really wanted to check out was Noodle Station. Noodle Station is one of those places I didn’t find from reviews, or from people waiting in long lines, or from signage. Noodle Station is one of those places that we found purely from the smell. Located on Skolavordustigur just down from Hallgrimskirkja, we couldn’t miss Noodle Station on our first day in Reykjavik; they were prepping for the day, and the entire place smelled of star anise and wonderful soup broth. But that first day, we were never in that part of town when they were open. But now that we were back in Reykjavik, and it was lunchtime, we decided that this time we’d check out Noodle Station.

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Nijiya Market (San Diego, CA)

On our third day in Southern California, we decided to take a morning and head down to San Diego and check out a few sights off the beaten path. We ended up hiking most of the length of Los Peñasquitos Canyon Preserve, which was a pleasantly quiet and nice canyon, considering that it’s nestled in between dense subdivisions to both the north and south. I still recommend it if you are looking for a nice urban-area hike. After our hike, however, we were a little hungry. We already had dinner plans back up in Temecula that involves copious amount of food and wine, so we were looking for something light. Luckily, I actually follow several other blogs that cover San Diego, including mmm-Yoso!!! (several contributors of which were my companions on the Yuma taco crawl a few years back) and A Radiused Corner (whose owner Dennis and I have been trading recommendations, and occasionally visiting the same places, for a few years now). Both blogs recommended stopping by Nijiya Market, one of San Diego’s best Japanese grocery stores, as a good place for both Japanese groceries and light meals.

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Asiana Noodle Shop (Burlington, VT)

Last weekend, we found ourselves heading up to Burlington, Vermont, for some light shopping and entertainment. One of the things I’ve always enjoyed about Burlington is that it has a good restaurant scene, with a lot of good-looking spots that I haven’t yet tried. One of these that I noticed on a recent trip was Asiana Noodle Shop, nestled into a basement on Church St. Opened back in 2009 in a fairly dark subterranean space with the office-supply-store vibe that seems to be common with many Asian places, the folks at Asiana converted what used to be a burrito shop into a noodle houlse with a very extensive menu of Asian noodle dishes, as well as a fairly extensive sushi menu…

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