Happiness is a good bowl of noodles, and right now we have many reasons to be happy. At first glance it’s a simple dish: the combining of flour and water to make a dough, which in turn is pulled or cut into ribbons, to be flicked into the roiling, bubbling waters and drained. These are augmented by toppings, either soothing or explosive. But like all the best simple things, it’s complicated. Good noodle-making is about the careful management of unseeable glutens and starches. There is the heat and depth of the liquids in which the noodles are simmered and the time they loiter there. It’s about the balance and shameless excess of the things that go on top; the crunchy chilli oils, bean pastes and crisp vegetables, applied like your mouth has been good today and deserves rewards.
A decade ago, London saw a boom in ramen shops, which then spread out across the UK, bringing us Japan’s intense way with thin noodles and creamy, collagen-rich broths made from a day’s simmering of pork bones. Now it’s the turn of regional China to show us the way. At the recently opened Noodle Inn on Soho’s Old Compton Street, dishes from Gansu province have mellifluous, come-hither names like “oil spill wide noodles with braised beef” and “knife cut noodles with minced pork in soybean paste”. There’s Greedy Sheep, just off Leicester Square, which offers customisable bowls with broths from “original” to “extra spicy” bobbing with cuts of offal and tendon. At Noodles and Beer at the bottom end of Wardour Street, they will snip a chilli and cumin-crusted braised short rib from the bone over ribbons that are the white of old piano keys. And the best thing? A properly sustaining bowl of noodles is great value.
That only adds intrigue to the quiet opening at the Peninsula hotel on Hyde Park Corner of the Little Blue Noodle Bar. The Peninsula is to cheap what Dita Von Teese is to dowdy. Rooms there start from around £1,000 a night. In its Chinese restaurant Canton Blue, of which the Little Blue Noodle Bar is an offshoot, the Peking duck is £135. And now, in the shimmering, lacquered, ultramarine cocktail bar at street level, they are serving up classy bowls of titivated noodles at £15 a pop, or £20 with a Gweilo beer.