Noodlecraft

We walked by this restaurant one evening as we were walking back, and I was reminded that this was something I wanted to try. At a quick glance, the interior seemed pretty spacious, and I always go back and forth on whether we can go here. My partner is never fanatical about noodles, but luckily this restaurant has other things such as dim sum and cold cut appetizers. This restaurant opened last year during the pandemic in October and seemed to have a pretty steady flow of repeat customers.

Ambiance

The interior design is a mash between industrial and night market feel. The ceilings are very high with lanterns hanging and visible pipes running around. There are plants in pots on on the wall, and lanterns hanging above. The communal bench tables can sit a large amount of people, but for 2 people can be very spacious. It’s definitely useful though if you do order many different dishes.

Directly in front of the restaurant, there is an outdoor setup that has 4-5 tables with very few cars that go by.

The service here is very speedy for dining in. Once they take your order, the food comes out in less than 15 minutes given if the crowd level is not high. When you pay, they bring a remote card reader. Sometimes they might get busy, so make sure to flag them down if needed.

Food

Both drinks were ordered large, and they are pretty large.

The thai milk tea (left) wasn’t too sweet and actually tasted pretty good.

The coconut milk tea with (lychee) jelly (right) was good too.

The sliced beef in sesame chili oil came cold and wasn’t that spicy. The beef was pretty tender and tasted like how it looks.

The braised beef noodle soup came with round hand pulled noodles, beef chunks, and carrots. What is cool is you can pick different kinds of noodles including knife cut noodles, wide hand pulled noodles, rice, and egg. There were hints of soy sauce and star anise in the broth. The round hand pulled noodles were quite delicious with a good bounce to them. The beef chunks were tender and plentiful. Overall, this is one of the better traditional beef noodle soups that I’ve had in NYC.

The wontons in chili oil came with 8 pieces. I was expecting a more salty dressing to this, but the wontons were pretty good in flavor.

The steamed roast pork buns came with 3 pieces and was pretty standard flavor wise.

The steamed shrimp shu mai came with 3 pieces and tasted like traditional dim sum shrimp shu mai.

The steamed pork ribs in garlic soy came with a lot of little pork pieces. Unlike normal dim sum places, there were no black beans in this. Nonetheless, it still tasted pretty close to the standard cantonese dimsum except it was less salty.

Final Verdict

If there’s one word that describes this restaurant, it would be “homely”. The food here isn’t the best Chinese in NYC, but it felt very close to home especially being in Long Island City. Most of the dishes were pretty good, so this is a great restaurant if you’re craving for not too expensive Chinese/Taiwanese-ish food.

Yelp Jabs

Singaporean Laksa was very creamy but lacked depth of flavor. A few bites provided a visual of a lot of coconut milk mixed with curry paste.

It seems the Singaporean Laska is pretty hit/miss here. I feel that this is all very subjective, but it’s quite clear on Yelp that the management is still trying to tweak the flavors to meet the average review.

The scallion pancakes were nothing like the ones you get at the Korean restaurants

This Yelper apparently hasn’t realized to this day that this is a Chinese restaurant. Looking forward to the day they complain that Japanese ramen noodles are nothing like the ones you get at the Italian restaurants.