Noodle St — Restaurant in Arcadia

We moved through the wait list fairly quickly for a table for 4 on Black Friday @ 6pm. Total wait time was less than 30 minutes. We were seated along the walkway between Noodle Street and DTF. I really wanted to like this place but I think I don’t like the large, open concept/layout and exposure of this restaurant. I found myself keeping an area on our personal belongings and shopping bags since we felt “exposed” and didn’t want to let our guard down. The service was quick and efficient with the servers on point to take your order and get things moving.

The soup noodles came quickly followed by the appetizers which was ok since we just wanted to fill out bellies and get out. The knife cut noodles are nice and chewy which I liked but some may think it’s undercooked since it’s not your normal springy noodle. That kind of where the good parts end. The other parts of the dish were just ok, nothing that knocked my socks off. The beef in the spicy beef noodle soup wasn’t as tender as I’d like and was slightly on the dry side except for the pieces laced with tendon. The tomato sauce ok (my friend did not finish and opted not to take the leftovers home). Without leeks and The signature beef and cilantro, the signature beef noodle soup was left colorless! You do need it!!! Appetizers - cucumber salad was crispy and refreshing but not any better than those found at other restaurants, we found the fried calamari over fried and too chewy and wasn’t dazzled by the scallion pancakes. I think if this was the only place with available seating and I was starving - I’d go back. If not, I’d pass on a...

The love the Chinese have for noodles is perhaps only rivalled by the Italian’s love for pizza. There must be at least 100’s of different varieties of noodles in China catering to different regions throughout the country. In Beijing alone, there are so many different kinds of noodle dishes in the city, from the traditional Beijing noodles with soy bean paste to braised noodles with cowpea, to the scallion noodles from southern China, and ramen from Japan.

Here at Noodle St. in Arcadia, you can sample some of those norther region noodles made with hand pulled. This restaurant mimics the Beijing street food noodles. You can order from four different types of in House made noodles including hand pulled regular round noodle, flat noodle, knife cut noodle and triangle noodles.

To go with the noodles, you can choose different toppings. The special beef round noodle is everyone’s favorite. The beef is tender and flavorful and the broth tasted amazing.

I love their knife cut noodles with egg and tomato. When I was on assignment working in Beijing, I would have one bowl of this kind of noodle at least twice a week at the food court in our office building, just didn’t seemed to have enough of them.

Other items like scallion pancake, beef rolls, and lamb skewers are excellent.

The service is amazing here. Our server kept coming back to our table to make sure our needs were all taking care of. They were very friendly.

Highly recommend this place. If you don’t want to wait in a long line next door at Din Tai Fung, you can definitely give this place a try, you won’t be...

The service was particularly mediocre, below average even.

Upon sitting down, four different servers came over and asked whether I was ready to order. I was NOT, and would not like to say the same thing over and over again.

The entirely Chinese staff sure doesn’t help in the already unwelcoming environment. Among the five or six employees I interacted with, only 2 knew how to say “thank you”, making themselves a laughable and much weaker competitor of Ding Tai Fung next door.

The food was surprisingly underwhelming. Not sure how I feel about the beef roll pancake that tasted bland - I frankly never had a Chinese beef pancake that’s actually good.

The savory braised chicken noodle, however, came with a quite uninteresting soup base not on par with how a regular Chinese recipe would taste. To make it worse, every single piece of chicken in the noodle was made of chicken breast, a terrible practice I never ever see at any other Chinese restaurant.

Oddly I have been to another Noodle St location that’s slightly better overall.

Needless to say, I regretted not going to Ding Tai Fung today and absolutely will not be back to this Noodle...