Last night, I went to a place that—as recently as Sunday—proclaimed itself to be a Halal Chinese restaurant. I’m fascinated by the many manifestations of Chinese cuisine that I didn’t grow up with, so I was excited to see who these Chinese Muslims were and what they were eating. I hoped they might be Uyghurs, an ethnic group from China’s far west who enjoy superior noodles, and who suffer the unfortunate fate of being automatically blamed anytime anything blows up.
I sat, and immediately noticed pork all over the menu. I looked up to see that all the Halal signs were gone. I guess the owners’ experimentation with Mohammad’s teachings was short-lived, or maybe there was some kind of Chinese Inquisition. Anyway, I was bummed.
But I was already sitting, the people next to me seemed to be enjoying themselves, and so I asked to have whatever they were having. I got a mound of white wheat noodles topped with an even larger mound of mild chili peppers, thinly sliced and stir-fried with a few strips of beef.
I’d been here before, during the pre-Halal days, and never liked this place. So, unsurprisingly, the dish was not exciting, and my first bite filled me with the sinking feeling of being saddled with a large bowl of food I wasn’t going to enjoy.
But then, as I ate, I got more into it. It still wasn’t thrilling, but the noodles were reasonably made, and the peppers had a fruitiness and made my face water just a little bit. The meal had a sort of comforting blandness, just tasty enough to keep me coming back for the next bite, to rediscover the satisfaction of a mouthful of yielding chewiness.
Because there wasn’t a ton of flavor to go around, I realized that this texture is one of the many glories of noodles. They can have the lovely ability to slip around one another in the mouth, giving just the barest sense of motion before getting caught and chewed down. There’s something captivating, I realized, about their coyness. I didn’t get to have any hand-pulled Längmän last night, but I did leave with an understanding of why I would have liked it.
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