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Saturday September 11, 2010

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Noodle Kingdom

Posted by: Ela Carte | 30 July, 2010 - 3:19 PM
Noodle Kingdom

Noodle Kingdom
469 High Street Preston 9478 8885 

This week I headed out to a place that highly recommended from a variety of friends, bloggers, professional reviewers, Noodle Kingdom in Preston.

This strip of High Street contains a myriad of Asian restaurants, but what sets NK apart is the the dedicated noodle and dumpling makers perched in the front window. It’s worth propping at the front door for a moment to see them in action. You can’t get any fresher than a restaurant kneading, rolling, stacking dough to order – all day, every day.

The smell inside NK is of the variety that automatically made me feel sickeningly hungry, I swear that hunger wasn’t there before. To a degree, it’s your garden variety noodle house, a long building with a cushioned bench seat down one wall, but for those of you who have been to something like Auntie’s dumplings it’s certainly a step up from that one in terms of décor and comfort.

Easy menu of 120 hot items with pictures, wonderful in a way, but at the same time so very hard to make a decision. We lamented that fact that there was no dumpling combination … so many different types to choose from, but all in fairly large quantities so you’re limited to ordering just one or two if you’re in a pair. In the end we went for some Steamed Shanghai Pork Dumplings and the Pork Dumplings in Hot and Spicy Soup. The Steamed ones were gorgeous, that little burst of soup when you bite in, and a fresh gingery pork filling. The Dumplings in soup weren’t so hot or spicy, I guess it was the chilli oil that was supposed to add the kick, and though the dough ends up a bit stickier they’re really not so different otherwise to the first selection.

From the mains we chose the Stewed Mutton with Red Chilli and spices, don’t ask me why because it’s not something I might otherwise have picked out, but I trusted NK  to do it well and wanted to try something out of the ordinary. Felt a little strange because the meal really didn’t have those typical Asian flavours, but the meat was just melt-in-the-mouth softness, fell apart upon impact and there was just the right amount of spice. This is real homestyle cooking, bits and pieces of bone all over the place, but certainly worth it for the authentic flavour.

So what it is that makes this place a step above and causes the queues outside its front door most evenings? Well, that will be obvious when you taste their divine noodles, in our case the Spicy Pork Fried Noodles. Sounds like a fairly stock standard Chinese order, but the very first mouthful was followed by audible sighs. Don’t know that I can exactly why it was so very good … the fresh, quite obviously just made noodles with a hint of soy, thin tasty pork, and what tasted to me to be big flakes of roasted chilli.

Amusing to us though was the order in which the dishes arrived - where we assumed we’d start with dumplings and move our way up to the meat dish, so we were surprised when the mutton arrived first, followed by noodles, and finally the dumplings.

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