Northern Cafe — Restaurant in Monterey Park

If you're looking for Beijing / Northern Chinese style food, you should checkout Northern Cafe.

All the noodles are handmade and hand-pulled. They even have a glass window just as you walk-in to watch the sous-chefs pull the noodles similar to what you see when you go to Din Tai Fung (DTF).

They have everything from beijing meat pies to Xiao Long Boas (XLBs). While their XLBs aren't the DTF quality the rest of their food is on point.

The traditional lamb skewers are common street food items in Beijing and their rendition of it is just as good and probably slightly healthier.

All their soups were tasty and the noodles were amazingly stretchy / bouncy to get that good handmade toothsomeness to each bite.

We weren't a big fan of the sesame bread since we were expecting something closer to Da Bing, but it came out more like a fried angle food cake looking thing that was mostly just bread-y.

The potstickers are legit here where they come out as a beautifully spindly cluster that gives it that extra bit of crunch.

For the other reviews that gave it a lower score because "it's not a cafe" are simply lame. It's true, it's not your regular boba tea cafe, but the place is modern and clean. It's a sit down casual restaurant with lots of space and good for parties up to 10.

For a person who lives in the area and who has been to many restaurants in the area, Northern Cafe is...

Ordered two spicy dishes and neither were spicy at all, but very oily. Flavors were ok, nothing that really stood out. They had chili oil on the table but even that wasn’t very spicy, so no matter how much i added it didn’t give the kick was was hoping for but just added more oil. I did like the cut noodles though. Very chewy and held up to the sauce. Chicken was tasty but hard to eat. Seemed like every piece was from part of a chicken with complex bones. I didn’t seem to get a single leg or thigh with just the main bone to deal with. The spicy wontons were also tasty, just not spicy.

I want to try this place again since their ox bone ramen sounded delish. Maybe the trick is to order the non spicy dishes?

Service is a total bummer. We got seated right away and menus and water served right away, but they avoid conversation. Maybe a language thing? Can’t say a since they hardly said a word and had to flag them down and use sign language from a distance to get a box to...

Fresh hand-made noodles are delicious here! You can see them making it when you come into the shop. There are 4 different ways to get the noodles: thin, regular, thick and knife cut. We got #13 and it was so good we cleaned out the soup bowl.

Depends on how much you can eat, but the bowl was enough for 4 people and we had side dishes like lamb dumpling (good not gamey), and beef rolls.

Don't order the potato shrimp rolls. Just don't

Table service is almost non-existent (2-stars). It's kind of like a cafeteria but not. So help yourself to more water, why not? Everyone was doing it. The tables are big for groups and has a casual feel to it. But the lack of table service will not deter me because it felt like a place where you can just walk around and not feel weird.

I don't think our waiteress spoke English. So I pretty much used hand gestures throughout our dining experience, until we found out we spoke a common...