Tag: chinese noodles

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Chinese

Xi’an Restaurant (西安风味小吃) – Ashfield NSW Restaurant Review

One of my favourite things about Xi’an restaurants is that they are almost invariably named “Xi’an Restaurant”. We ate here in the first week of having moved house, in a flurry of cheap and cheerful dines out whilst we were still unpacking our kitchen.

The food was generally good. This Chinese pork burger Roujiamo 肉夹馍 ($8) was moist and meaty, flavourful though lacking any visible vegetables or herbs.

The Pan Fried Chives Pancake 韭菜盒子  ($7) is a relative favourite of mine. This example had a good crispiness to the skin, which was kept thin so as to maximise the filling to pastry ratio. A good example in a sea of good examples.

The Rice with Yuxiang Eggplant 鱼香茄子 ($16) was a vegetarian version of the dish, well priced, tasty, and very filling. Something my partner enjoys and I am yet to make an edible version of.

Comments
Though readers will note that only the roujiamou was particularly Xi’an in origin, this restaurant executed good versions of Northern as well as Sichuan cuisine at good prices. I’m sure we will be back for more.

UPDATE 13/03/2026


I went back by myself last night, about half an hour before close, for a bowl of noodles. I kind of rationalised going back without my wife by it being just a quick meal, that was ultimately going to be cheaper than buying groceries and cooking for one. The Biang Biang Noodles 𰻞𰻞面 were $17. The service was fast, and the bowl was gigantic. The sauce or gravy of the noodles was extremely delicious, with lots of umami flavour contributed to by the variety of ingredients including egg, pork (with cubes of both lean and fatty meat), as well as tomato, a natural source of glutamate.

The cubes of potato added a richness and thickness to the soup that would have been difficult to achieve with tomato alone, ensuring that flavours clung to each road strand of noodle. The noodles themselves were a bit more soft and well cooked than I would have expected, however thicker parts of the noodle did retain a signature kind of bounce to them, which was I liked.

It was overall a good bowl of noodles at a reasonable price, that I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend.

Xi’an Restaurant (西安风味小吃)
30 Hercules St, Ashfield NSW 2131
0426 092 275

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Chinese

Swanky Noodle – Parramatta NSW Restaurant Review

When we first ate at Swanky Noodle back in 2019, we were very impressed by the dingy decor, the no fuss service, and the excellent Northern Chinese cuisine. Flash forward to 2023, and we found ourselves back at Swanky Noodle for dinner in between acute stroke calls, a particularly interesting part of the public health service where a non-radiologist is tasked with reading a CT Angiogram, CT Perfusion, and non-contrast CT Brain and making a decision as to whether or not someone should get thrombolytic therapy within the course of minutes.

Good as ever was this Hot Stewed Beef with Noodle Soup ($13.80). It was a large and well priced bowl, with chewy, twangy housemade hand-pulled noodles in a richly umami soup. There was plenty of very tender beef, and it’s easy to see why this is one of their most popular dishes.

Less good were these pan-fried dumplings ($13.80), which most importantly were pan-fried, rather than boiled, like we asked for. The boiled dumplings were great back in 2019, but pan-fried dumplings are just lower effort in general. They were very meaty.

The spring pancake ($13.80) I also didn’t love, mainly because they were dryer than expected and filled with vermicelli, complicated by the fact that of the two separate guys in the kitchen one guy had cooked the filling but the other guy had forgotten the wrapper until a bit later. The equivalent of this dish that we had back in the day was full of chives (I have photo evidence from the 8th of September 2019) and much better.

OVERALL THOUGHTS

The beef soup noodles were as good as ever, but the other things we had were complicated by mishaps and also just not being what we wanted. It is true that we visited half an hour before closing, but we weren’t the last table to enter and be served, and would’ve rathered a maximum of one accident per meal. I’m upset because I had really quite fond memories of this place. If only we had stopped at the noodle, the fondness would’ve remained

Swanky Noodle
131 Church St, Parramatta NSW 2150
(02) 9633 1173

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Chinese

A Bowl Of Noodles 一碗面 – Haymarket NSW Restaurant Review

Unfortunately my dinner at A Bowl of Noodles did not live up to the expectations set by following their social media over the past year or so.

The Yellow Croaker Noodles ($23.80), one of the restaurant’s signature dishes, did not amaze me. It had unfortunately and probably unavoidably quite a fishy smell to it, though to its credit it did not actually taste fishy. The flavour of the soup was quite light, umami, and pleasant, though pleasant not to the degree that we wanted to finish it.

The Pan Fried Pork Buns (sheng jian bao 生煎包 – $11.80) were fine on the outside with good dough and crispiness, but oddly gooey on the inside. I won’t go so far as to say uncooked, because I don’t know for a fact and I didn’t get sick after my meal, but these buns were generally unpleasant for me.

The chive and pork dumplings (10 for $13.90) were actually very good. They stood alone as a dish that met expectations and were the highlight of the meal.

I kind of felt that the xiao long bao ($9.80) would be a dish that I could trust that a Shanghainese specialty restaurant would do well, but I was of course mistaken. These XLBs were quite dry and devoid of soup, without even any holes in the skin that could explain it. I’ve had much better steamed from a box from the frozen section of my local Asian supermarket.

COMMENTS. I didn’t find what I was looking for.

A Bowl Of Noodles 一碗面
735 George St, Haymarket NSW 2000
0415 483 140

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Chinese

Shanghai Night – Ashfield NSW Restaurant Review

There’s this super odd row of restaurants on Liverpool Road in Ashfield where separate establishments named “New Shanghai Night”, “New Shanghai”, and “Shanghai Night” are lined up one after another. The subject of our review today is Shanghai Night, the Westernmost of the three.

The Shanghai Spicy Noodle Soup ($12.80) was good. It was quite a large serving for the price, and with plenty of meat and flavourful soup. Not too spicy. Not much else to say apart from a recommend.

The Si-Chuan Dry Wonton with Cucumber and Chilli Oil ($10.80) looked vastly different to the menu photo, but tasted pretty good. The wontons were plenty meaty, however my partner raised some concerns about the state of the peanut butter, which I did chose not to try.

The Steam Shanghai Style Mini Pork Bun ($8.80) were not the best. The most disappointing thing about them was the fact that they were mostly broken. In fact, only 2 out of the 8 were received intact, a feat that I can easily manage with a box of frozen xiao long bao at home.

THOUGHTS: With so many competitors in the Shanghai food space within a one metre radius, I don’t think I will be going back to this particular restaurant any time soon.

Shanghai Night
275 Liverpool Rd, Ashfield NSW 2131
(02) 9798 8437

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Chinese

Tarim Uyghur Handmade Noodles – Auburn NSW Restaurant Review

Last year we went to the Ramadan night markets in Lakemba just down the road from where we live twice, and I got gastroenteritis twice. This year I did not wish to be unwell, and so we skipped the night markets for a sit down meal in one of Sydney’s other Muslim centres.

We started with besip lagman ($18), flat noodles stir fried with diced meat, cabbage and red peppers. We enjoyed these noodles, with its tangy tomato sauce base, good umami flavour, and nicely jin dao noodles. The “meat” topping was stated at the top of the menu as a mixture of lamb and beef, and I wonder if it would have been less suspicious to in the description of each item rather than just at the top of the menu.

The toho qordah (small: $20), descriped as special chilli chicken braised with potatoes, red peppers, and shallots, complemented with flat noodles was unfortunately almost exactly the same thing as the besip lagman, except for the addition of potatoes and the substitution of chicken. Again a tomatoey base, but with a tiny amount of spice this time, and a little bit more oily. I’m not usually a big fan of chopped up chicken drumsticks, but I did not mind it in this case as there were not really any broken bone fragments for me to spit out. My partner, potato-fan as she is, was not too sad at the sameiness of this dish, though ultimately I think we would’ve liked to try something else instead.

The kawap lamb skewers ($4.50 each) were really quite good. Super tender, but not fatty at all. No significant unwanted lambiness to them. Quite good, though I wonder if they would’ve been better with some chilli (I have no idea if this would take it away from being traditional Uyghur cuisine).

OVERALL THOUGHTS. Pretty good. Not expensive. Great lamb. I don’t know why the guys on the table next to us were so surprised that they didn’t serve alcohol.

Tarim Uyghur Handmade Noodles
105 Rawson St, Auburn NSW 2144
(02) 9649 9085