Susan Ji-Young Park

Läghmän with lamb sauce at Silk Road Garden Restaurant

Silk Road Garden opened last year in a busy shopping center populated with Chinese restaurants. If you're keen on assertively seasoned hand-pulled noodles with distinct Chinese flavors, you won't find it here. The aromas of pork, caramelized soy sauce, smoky ginger and garlic, oil and spices heated beyond the flash point, and the musky charred scent of well seasoned woks are entirely absent. Instead, you have the distinct scent of grilled lamb, slow-cooked meat broths, baked dough and cumin of Central Asian cooking.

At Silk Road Garden, Uyghur and Muslim tapestries and photos of Xinjiang cultural life adorn the walls. Small shelves are lined with wooden Uyghur dolls reminiscent of Russian matryoshka.

Open less than nine months, proprietor Asker Abuduxkur is still training his staff and will continue to add dishes. Ququra (alternatively spelled "chuchura"), soup made with thumb sized dumplings, isn't available yet, though it's on the menu. But manta, ququra's fist sized cousin, bursting with juicy minced lamb and onions or pumpkin, are available.

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G. Snyder

Boat Noodles at Pa-Ord

Leading up to this year's Best of L.A. issue (due out Oct. 4), we'll be counting down, in no particular order, 100 of our favorite dishes.

92: Thai Boat Noodles at Pa-Ord.

You ask a friend with a reputation for never traveling beyond Sepulveda if she wants to join you for Thai food. She tells you, oh, of course, she loves Thai; can't get enough of it. But you furrow your eyebrows doubtfully as you cruise eastward along Hollywood Boulevard. This isn't pad Thai, or yellow curry, or pad see ew, you explain. This is graduate-level stuff -- the Bitches Brew of Bangkok cuisine. You're headed to a specialist of extra-murky boat noodles, or kuay tiew rua, one of the country's most beloved street foods.

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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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Jim Thurman

Yunnan House Special Rice Noodle Soup

Yunnan cuisine doesn't get the kind of respect accorded to the cuisine from other provinces. It isn't included in the "Eight Schools" of Chinese cuisine, instead being relegated to a subset of its neighbor to the north, Sichuan. Adding to that, there are only 11 Yunnan-style restaurants in the entire United States -- but fortunately for us, half of those are scattered across the San Gabriel Valley. Yet even at these restaurants, the menus are dominated by Sichuan dishes, with only a handful of Yunnan items to be found. Of these few Yunnan menu selections, the best known is the "Crossing The Bridge Noodles," the signature dish of the province.

There are many stories about the origin of the name, with the most often repeated involving a wife taking soup across a bridge to a small island where her husband was studying for his imperial exam. By the time she'd reach the other side of the winding footbridge, the soup would be cold, the noodles soggy. The story goes that one day a layer of oil and fat kept the broth warm and adding the noodles and meats allowed it to cook to perfection on the spot.

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A. Scattergood

Daikokuya in Arcadia

If you are the sort of person who spends a disproportionate amount of time waiting in line at the Daikokuya in Little Tokyo, or who frequents the other branches of the wildly popular Japanese noodle house just to avoid the aforementioned lines, you will have been overjoyed at the news that another Daikokuya opened last week. This location, the fifth, is a tiny stall in the President Square Food Court in Arcadia. In other words, just a few dozen steps north of the Ranch 99 on South Golden West Avenue.

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If the cavemen and frogs taught us anything it is that commercials don't have to have much to do with the products they promote. Some wares lend themselves to absurdity more readily than others, particularly those whose nuances are tough to render in just a few seconds of color and sound. Like insurance. Others -- such as a ubiquitous beer brand or a particular cup of instant noodles -- occupy a cluttered market. The best way to stand out is not to convince the audience yours tastes best but to simply captivate -- with humor, sex appeal, or surreal imagery -- and sear the brand into minds like a hot iron. We see our fill of beer commercials, but the best noodle ads invariably air outside the United States, in Japan, Thailand, and Korea -- places where noodles practically flow from the faucets. Turn the page for our Top 5 Noodle Commercials.

5. James Brown + Cup Noodle Miso: In 1992, one must surmise, James Brown received a very large paycheck for this. Just watching him dance and stir the broth apron-less while wearing such a dandy outfit -- cobalt blue, crushed velvet, sequins, some kind of diner-booth-lacquer near the shoulders -- makes us worry about his dry-cleaning bills.

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In case you haven't noticed, we really like noodles here. But while spaghetti and meatballs, pad thai, and ramen seem to get all the attention, other heavyweights are left to languish in relative obscurity. Zha jiang mian, for one, is amongst the all time great noodles in human history. So why is it less popular than, say, chow mein? The blame probably falls on its sauce, a fried mixture of pork and fermented soybean paste, which arrives at your table dark, sludgy, and mysterious. And while "zha jiang mian," with its many spelling variations, does in fact roll off the tongue, it's probably not as easy to remember as "phở." Nonetheless, it's time these noodles got a little extra PR, and as such, they are the subject of this week's food fight.

N. Galuten

Zha jiang mian at Malan Noodle

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L. Balla

If there's one thing Sang Yoon knows how to do, it's build anticipation. After months of preparation, rampant media speculation, publicist road blocks, and a few days of preview dinners last week, he finally debuts his new Culver City restaurant, Lukshon, tomorrow. It's safe to say, it was probably worth the wait.

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Rahmen Emanuel

Emanuel celebrates court decision with noodle finger prosthesis

Update: The Top Rahmen is back on top. The Chicago Sun Times reports that the Illinois Supreme Court has ruled 7-0 to allow Rahm Emanuel back on to the ballot for the Chicago Mayoral race.

He told the paper,

"As I said from the beginning, voters deserve a right to make a choice of who should be mayor,'' Emanuel said, "and I think what the Supreme Court said was basically in short that the voters will make the decision who should be mayor. No one should make it for them.''

For the original post, published January 25th, turn the page.
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After last week's masochistic adventures in Korean Bolognese, we figured we deserved some slightly better noodles this week. So we decided to turn our attentions toward Thai Town, and to take a look at pad see ew -- or as most people in the U.S. call it, "those Thai noodles that aren't pad Thai." Pad see ew is, at its core, a stir-fried dish of wide, flat noodles, with dark soy sauce, egg, some sort of animal protein, sugar, and Chinese broccoli. To find two different versions for today's food fight, we went to two acclaimed noodle specialists, Sanamluang and Pa-Ord Noodle.

N. Galuten

Sanamluang's pad see ew

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