FLOUR POWER!
Tasty Chinese hand-pulled noodles catch on in the city,
Omni Palace noodle chef Ao Ma works rapidly, transforming a ball of dough into increasingly finer strands of noodles, moving his hands together and apart. It’s mesmerizing, sort of like a very intense version of Cat’s Cradle.
As a flourish, to showcase what two decades’ worth of noodle-making can do, he takes out a needle and threads an ultra delicate strand through the eye.
“Even though there are machines that do this, it’s the hands where you can touch and find the perfect stage of noodles,” Ma says in Mandarin. “The hardest part is mixing the flour, too much water and it won’t stretch, it’s all about finding that right balance.”
Omni Palace is the latest Chinese hand-pulled noodle restaurant to open in the GTA, located in a new plaza behind a condo construction site and surrounded by office buildings just south of Sheppard Ave. E. and east of Victoria Park Ave. Ma is here for the next six months to train the restaurant’s young apprentices before moving on.
According to franchise owner Joe Li, this is the first location of the noodle chain outside of China.
“We think hand-pulled noodles are just getting their start in Toronto, just like 20, 30 years ago when Vietnamese chefs introduced pho,” he says.
Hand-pulled noodles (“lamain” in Chinese) were a bit of a rarity in Toronto a few years ago, with just a handful of restaurants that practised the centuries-old culinary tradition. Now, more noodle shops have popped up and international chains see Toronto as the ideal testing ground.
Li was born in Lanzhou, the capital city of China’s north- western Gansu province, famous for its hand-pulled noodles cooked in a clear beef broth that’s neither greasy nor too salty and meant to be drunk from the bowl after the noodles are eaten. “You drink it like tea,” Li says. When Li moved to Toronto three years ago, he says he couldn’t find a place where the noodles tasted like home. Luckily, he was friends with the Ma family (no relation to the noodle chef ) who started the massive hand-pulled noodle chain, in Lanzhou almost a century ago, and he worked with them to open his own location in Toronto.
At Li’s restaurant, the noodle-makers are the centre of attention as they whack, twist and pull noodles-to-order behind a giant glass wall that looks out to the dining room. After showing off his needle-thin noodles, Ao cooks up a simpler bowl of thicker, hand-pulled noodles in a beef shank broth to try. The noodles have that perfect chewy bounce that take on the broth’s rich beef flavour with a hint of daikon and a punch of cilantro and chili oil.
“Good hand-pulled noodles have to have a strong chew, a sign that the dough is stretchy enough to be made into thin strands. The first bite and the last bite shouldn’t have any difference in texture. If it’s made by machine, maybe the first few bites are good, but after a few minutes the noodles get soft,” says Li, adding that the broth at Omni Palace is a secret, three generations-old recipe that comes to the restaurant premade and that only the Ma family knows what its 28 ingredients are.
In China, Omni Palace is known as Donfang Gong, which started as a noodle stand in the 1920s. Now there are more than 450 locations throughout China where Lanzhou-style noodle shops are a fiercely competitive, serious business. Every local has their preferred place, declaring one place has a cleaner-tasting broth or the one down the street has chewier noodles. Lanzhou also hosts culinary schools where students learn the art of noodle-making. (Ao never went to noodle school; his father who made noodles started teaching him when he was four).
Other than Omni, a few Lanzhou noodle houses have opened in Toronto in the past few years. Including Lan Zhou Ramen and GB Hand-Pulled Noodles in the downtown core, the latter of which still has lunchtime lineups out the door even on a humid and hot August afternoon. It’s a new generation of Chinese eateries focusing on regional-specific dishes, continuing the trend of Chinese chains specializing in a particular food testing the market in Toronto, such as Dagu Rice Noodle, QJD Peking Duck and Shanghai-based dumpling chain Wu Jian Dao.
Li notes that the GTA is a perfect location for noodle houses to test the waters before expanding in other cities. What’s unique about Toronto is that there’s already a large Asian customer base who have either already heard of the restaurant or are at least familiar with hand-pulled noodles.
Li hopes that with Omni opening, the city will get to know more about the dish that he grew up with and has become a symbol of pride for Lanzhou.
“We’re sending our apprentice to China in March to learn more of these skills. When he’s good enough here, he can run his own restaurant here in Toronto or in another big city,” says Li. “There’s a big market. The hope is that more young people join our team and keep it going.”