Martin FrimetGet in the mood at Noodle Kingdom
May 7th 2008 23:58
Noodle Kingdom, on the outskirts of Melbourne’s Chinatown and smack in the middle of the CBD, is one of those rare and exciting places where you can pretty much trace the course of your dish from its very creation to its eventual presentation before you. First, walking along Russell Street, your eye is immediately drawn inside as a man who seems half-chef and half-fairground entertainer feverishly rolls, stretches, slaps and then slices large wads of dough into the restaurant’s eponymous main dish. Venture further inwards, and it is then possible to sit and watch a large, open kitchen where a highly charged troupe of other workers scurry around beside this Noodle King to stow, season and serve your order. As dining experiences go, it’s certainly more AFL than it is a la carte.
And yet, intriguing as it might be to see such a base, butch kitchen in action, the main reason I was here was not for the show, but to see how well fed I would get on one of the large selection of noodle dishes on offer for under $10. I was not to be disappointed.
My order of ‘Authentic’ Lanzhou Beef Soup was full of flavour, with noodles that were soft and floury and abundantly fresh. Mine was a simple, succulent and successful dish that tasted as authentic as it sounded. Thin cuts of meat were surprisingly plentiful for a dish costing only $7.50, and were ramped with a full, slow-cooked flavour. The soup stock itself was deep and smoky and yet with deliciously sharp hits of spring onion and an aniseed after-taste to help the whole thing flood riotously across your tongue. A side of savoury Chinese cake with barbecue pork filling was maybe a little heavy on bread but proved a willing accomplice when liberally dipped into puddles of soy and chilli sauce.
Food at Noodle Kingdom thus comes with a kind of earthy simplicity, an aura amply recreated by other elements of the restaurant. Service was unhurried without ever quite veering into lazy, while the decor was traditional without getting into tacky. Chinese music that was as authentic as anything on the menu played on a low volume and proved altogether soothing, lending the whole place a calm air; in fact, had the view from my second-floor window been something other than the back-end of a multi-storey car park, it might have been easy to forget that I was sitting only seconds away from one of the city’s busiest intersections, at Russell and Bourke Streets.
From the plain, well-etched wooden tables to the well-worn menus, nothing about Noodle Kingdom could be termed fine dining, but there can be few other places in Chinatown or across the city that offer such striking food at such knock-down prices. With close to all-day opening hours and with wads of hungry students and willing workers nearby, the Noodle King and his colleagues look sure to reign for some time to come.
Noodle Kingdom
175 Russell Street
Melbourne
And yet, intriguing as it might be to see such a base, butch kitchen in action, the main reason I was here was not for the show, but to see how well fed I would get on one of the large selection of noodle dishes on offer for under $10. I was not to be disappointed.
My order of ‘Authentic’ Lanzhou Beef Soup was full of flavour, with noodles that were soft and floury and abundantly fresh. Mine was a simple, succulent and successful dish that tasted as authentic as it sounded. Thin cuts of meat were surprisingly plentiful for a dish costing only $7.50, and were ramped with a full, slow-cooked flavour. The soup stock itself was deep and smoky and yet with deliciously sharp hits of spring onion and an aniseed after-taste to help the whole thing flood riotously across your tongue. A side of savoury Chinese cake with barbecue pork filling was maybe a little heavy on bread but proved a willing accomplice when liberally dipped into puddles of soy and chilli sauce.
Food at Noodle Kingdom thus comes with a kind of earthy simplicity, an aura amply recreated by other elements of the restaurant. Service was unhurried without ever quite veering into lazy, while the decor was traditional without getting into tacky. Chinese music that was as authentic as anything on the menu played on a low volume and proved altogether soothing, lending the whole place a calm air; in fact, had the view from my second-floor window been something other than the back-end of a multi-storey car park, it might have been easy to forget that I was sitting only seconds away from one of the city’s busiest intersections, at Russell and Bourke Streets.
From the plain, well-etched wooden tables to the well-worn menus, nothing about Noodle Kingdom could be termed fine dining, but there can be few other places in Chinatown or across the city that offer such striking food at such knock-down prices. With close to all-day opening hours and with wads of hungry students and willing workers nearby, the Noodle King and his colleagues look sure to reign for some time to come.
Noodle Kingdom
175 Russell Street
Melbourne
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