Noodle & More will wok your world
There is a moment in the new novel Number One Chinese Res
taurant when all hell breaks loose in the titular kitchen.
Orders are backing up. Owner Jimmy Han steps in to show his cooks how it’s done.
“He cranked the burner as high as it would go, until the air in front of his face shimmered with heat,” author Lillian Li writes.
Jimmy is making fried rice. “He lifted the wok with his left hand. One heavy flick and the rice transformed into a wave, cresting over the edge of the rim and breaking back down into the centre of the pan.
“He tasted sweat as he flipped the fried rice three more times. ‘Do it until your wrist breaks,’ ” Li writes.
Li’s Maryland restaurant is fictional but reading about it produces real hunger. One place to sate it is at Toronto’s Noodle & More, an unassuming Annex eatery with homey northern Chinese cooking and the chance to watch an actual kitchen at work.
In the front window hulks a flour-dusted counter where Sandy, who wouldn’t give her last name, rolls out white ropes of dough. She is making dumplings. She cuts nuggets of dough and flattens them with a wooden dowel, spooning in filling and gracefully pleating them closed. It’s a tempting sight. Inside the welcome is warm, less so for journalists asking questions. (Despite multiple attempts, including providing written Chinese questions, I was unable to get answers from the staff or the travelling owner. “Bring someone who speaks the language,” former Star columnist Joe Fiorito, who recommended the place had warned.)
Those dumplings ($12.49) turn out to be tight little balls of pork and cabbage that quickly slip their skins. Not the best example of the genre, even if the fried version wears a brown starch lattice across the bottom.
Hand-ripped noodles undulate like the readings on an oscilloscope. They are pleasantly chewy. Flavour comes from the broths, each unique. Lamb ($15.99) is fragrant with black pepper. Beef ($15.99) tastes of star anise. Dan dan ($14.49) brings a whack of garlic and the tongue-tingling of Szechuan peppercorns. These are fine cold-weather dishes, ideally chased with beer except Noodle & More is not licensed.
Chinese crepe ($7.50) is a floppy egg pancake wrapping crunchy fried dough and what tastes like Peking duck sauce. Less mild are shredded potatoes ($7.99) tossed in sesame oil and enough dried chilies to pounce on your tonsils like a playful kitten. Chili peppers and mouth-numbing Szechuan peppercorns are hallmarks of Szechuan cooking. Noodle and More combines them in its malatang, a choose-your-own casserole measured by weight ($12.45 for each 500 grams). The buffet holds 18 options, in- cluding bamboo shoots, two kinds of cabbage, bean curd sheets, fish cake and kelp. Even ordered mild, malatang (”numbing and hot” in Mandarin) is a big bowl of pain, not for the faint hearted.
Clanging metal fills the air at Noodle & More.
The cook, who wouldn’t provide his name, is making shrimp fried rice ($13.99) in the semiopen kitchen.
He flicks on the kitchen’s exhaust system, triggering a protective cascade of water down the back wall.
Blue flames lick the bottom of the well-seasoned wok. The cook adds oil, followed by a beaten egg and a takeout container worth of steamed rice. He shakes the wok back and forth with his left hand, forearm muscles bulging, while scraping its contents with the metal spatula in his right.
In goes a handful of tiny shrimp, a flurry of salt and a touch of soy. The cook moves with the kind of concentration expected when squaring off against high temperatures.
When it’s done, the rice is brown and glossy, not unlike the fictional version in Number One Chinese Restaurant:
“While he rested his hand, he pressed the rice down with the back of his ladle, until each individual grain was crisping in oil. He handed the wok back to its owner, instructing him to toss the rice until he saw it dance.”
Reading never tasted so good.