Clarissa Wei

Handmade noodles from Shaanxi Gourmet

There are few things in life better than a bowl of authentic and properly-constructed handmade noodles. Even in the San Gabriel Valley, it's hard to find a noodle place with the real thing, made by a seasoned chef trained in China. We've encountered some: Kam Hong Garden from Shanxi, Sweethome Grill from Henan, and Shaanxi Gourmet from Shaanxi. Noodle making is a dying art form; chefs who can properly make a bowl of mian stand out.

The classification of Chinese noodles, a Northern China (bei fang 北方) specialty, gets complicated. Handmade can mean a lot of things: hand-kneaded, hand-pulled, hand-torn or knife-cut. The knife-cut variety (dao xiao mian 刀削面） originates from Shanxi, and is made by shaving off a kneaded piece of dough with a small blade. The hand-pulled version (la mian 拉面) is a Lanzhou delicacy and is crafted by repeatedly stretching the dough. Noodles need to be kneaded for long periods of time to get a chewy consistency.

Note that handmade noodles aren't just limited to Lanzhou and Shanxi. Shaanxi (a different province than Shanxi), Henan and Xinjiang have their own version of handmade noodles as well. The common denominator: They're all provinces in Northern China.

Despite the technicalities, we've scoured the city and rounded up the 10 best Chinese handmade noodle restaurants in Los Angeles. We took into account the quality of the dishes, the "Q" (al dente in Chinese) factor of the noodles and the overall atmosphere of the restaurant. Turn the page.

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Linda Burum

Dragon's whiskers salad at Cafe Fusion

It's a great time to eat at Café Fusion. May officially kicks off dragons' whiskers salad season at the eight-year-old Taiwanese restaurant, and it also marks the seasonal arrival of locally grown baby bamboo shoots, yam leaves and other produce you rarely see elsewhere.

The restaurant attained cult status among vegetable-loving Taiwanese way before locavore and farm-to-table became overused menu buzzwords and now its phones are just getting slammed. "Our regulars call in to find out when we'll start serving the dragons' whiskers dish, it's a big favorite" says owner Arthur Chen.

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J. Thurman

Mustard cabbage, Beijing Restaurant, San Gabriel

Trying to find a particular Chinese regional or local specialty can be quite an adventure, even among the hundreds of restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley. The search
for these items, be it Datong-style braised rabbit heads or Tianjin-style earhole cakes, can produce tales worthy of an explorer.

This time, the tale revolves around the efforts by one Chowhound poster to find a dish he'd enjoyed in Beijing: mustard cabbage. The dish is popular around Beijing, but proved frustratingly elusive in greater Los Angeles. Even with the help of the SGV hounds, it was more than two years after his initial query before word came of a place in Rowland Heights that had it. He arrived only to find the item crossed off the menu, his hopes dashed.

Unlike the Tianjin-style earhole cakes, which weren't found at any Tianjin-style eateries, the mustard cabbage from Beijing finally was found ... at Beijing Restaurant, located upstairs in Life Plaza.

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Flickr/ltcarter

In the hierarchy of restaurant rolodexes there have always been certain places for specific moods -- places to celebrate an anniversary or a first date, places when you're feeling particularly adventurous for, say, for Hunan braised fish or lamb biryani. At the very bottom rung of this ladder, if you're like us, are those peculiar days when some greasy takeout seems inexplicably more appealing than a prime round of steak or a fresh kale salad -- the food equivalent of a quickie hook-up in the back of an El Camino.

If you can resist the occasional pull of the Americanized Chinese combo plate -- there are plenty of those in L.A. who can -- we salute you. But for us, a list of places where an overstuffed box of chow mein and orange chicken is an invaluable asset when you find yourself weak in the knees for some MSG. (In this field, Midtown Lunch's Zach Brooks has been a true pioneer.) Skip Panda Express and support one of these local Chinese fast food shops; your food will taste better and probably end up cheaper, too. Feel free to add your own favorite steam-tray dives in the comments as well.

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J. Thurman

"Fried With Meat" at Beijing Restaurant, San Gabriel

While it isn't as prevalent as pork, lamb turns up quite often on Chinese restaurant menus in the San Gabriel Valley, where lamb dishes range from the seemingly omnipresent cumin lamb skewers to soups, stews and meat pies. There also are restaurants like China Islamic and Omar's, the Uighur place, where lamb is the featured meat. But, for arguably the best lamb item in the SGV, one needs to head to Beijing Restaurant and order "Fried With Meat."

Located upstairs in Life Plaza, near the lavish Shanghai No. 1, Beijing Restaurant opened in 2010, providing the area with several unique Beijing-style entrées and appetizers. With the opening of its neighbor, the restaurant has upgraded to a more stylish menu and improved décor.

About that menu. It's fortunate that there are so many nice photos, as the translations aren't very helpful to English speakers. You won't find a "lamb burger" or "lamb sandwich" on the menu, but that's essentially what it is. Instead, you'll find it as "fried with meat."

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Christine Chiao

Flavor Garden's golden shrimp tofu dumpling

Flavor Garden's golden shrimp dumpling was so named for a reason no longer apparent at first glance. At 10 to a plate for $6.99, they are plump with tofu, scallions and fresh shrimp. Reference to ingots that dumplings have traditionally symbolized in Chinese culture notwithstanding, they appear like any other dumpling. It turns out owner Jenny Peng had slightly grander plans for the wrapper that enrobed the filling she fashioned after a similar dish she has enjoyed at Chinese seafood restaurants.

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J. Thurman

Confused?

One of the great things about the abundance of Chinese restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley comes in discovering unique menu items. These can range from hard-to-find distinctive regional dishes to the mundane that simply got lost in translation.

When it came to our attention that a restaurant was serving something called Shanghai Confusion Meat, we had to make a visit. Since these items have a tendency to disappear rather quickly from menus, it's always best to try them out as soon as possible. We missed out on the donkey roll at Beijing Pie House (which, for the record, is a dessert and features no donkey meat), and we weren't about to let it happen this time.

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Flickr/Tohru

Little Sheep's spicy herbal soup stock.

Little Sheep Mongolian Hot Pot opened their San Gabriel location yesterday, April 4. This is the chain restaurant's second location in the greater Los Angeles area. The menu is similar to it's Hacienda Heights counterpart, featuring herbal, spicy and vegetarian soup stock options.

"Everything is pretty smooth so far," Little Sheep International CEO Michael Wu said. "We're just ironing out the little things."

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J. Thurman

Green onion pancake, Earthen Restaurant

The green onion pancake is one of the most common items on Chinese menus around the San Gabriel Valley. Yet whenever the popular appetizer comes up, one restaurant is invariably mentioned first and foremost: Earthen. For one place to be singled out as having the best of something so common speaks volumes.

The item, cōng yóu bǐng in Pinyin, is a flatbread made from unleavened dough that is twisted into a coil before being rolled out into layers with sesame oil and scallions in between. Then it's pan-fried. The result is a savory laminated pastry.

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Jim Thurman

12. Juicy fish dumpling (xiao long bao), Wang Xing Ji

The panoply of Chinese regional cuisines in the San Gabriel Valley recently increased by one with the opening of Wang Xing Ji, a San Gabriel outpost of a noted Wuxi restaurant operating since 1913. Located in San Gabriel Square, the large shopping plaza known as "The Great Mall of China," the restaurant sits in an upstairs space formerly occupied by Sichuan standout Shu Feng Yuan and most recently by a place that served a few Wuhan style items.

Those familiar with Shanghainese dishes will recognize some items on a menu small by SGV standards: xiao long bao, rice ball in wine sauce soup, smoked fish. Well, you won't see xiao long bao by that name at WXJ, as they appear in the Steamed Dumpling section as Juicy Dumplings. Undoubtedly, this will revive the "soup dumpling" nomenclature debate, but we'll let message board posters sort that out.

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