Beef noodle soups with hand-pulled noodles are the specialty of 1919 Lanzhou Beef Noodle. Photo: Martin Conway.
If you’re partial to a noodle soup – and who isn’t really – you’re likely already familiar with 1919 Lanzhou Beef Noodle.
With two stores in Canberra and nearly two dozen across Australia, these fast and affordable soup and noodle dishes by Tove Hospitality have made their way around the country in just seven years.
Specialising in high-volume food service to feed the masses that descend here on a busy night, it’s easy to get lost in your bowl of noodles and not stop to appreciate what you’re really eating.
And what you’re really eating is thousands of years of history combined with many years of practice in the art of hand-pulling noodles.
Heading to the Canberra Centre location on a bustling Saturday night, I watch people come and go from the continual full house at 1919 Lanzhou Beef Noodle.
As they do, very few people, if any, stop to watch the chef in the window, instead making a beeline for a table as one opens up.
The signature move of 1919 Lanzhou Beef Noodle is the chef in the window hand-pulling noodles. Photo: Supplied.
If you can spare that moment to stop and watch, what you will see is a talented chef making it look incredibly easy to knead, roll, stretch and swing hefty balls of noodle dough until you have the strands of noodles that will appear in your dish.
All of the noodles dished up at 1919 Lanzhou Beef Noodle are made on-site and are hand-pulled in full view of the customers.
It’s an art that was first recorded in written text in 1504 but has a history dating back 4000 years to the first archaeological evidence of noodles, which were found in what is now the Qinghai province of China, a neighboring province to Gansu province, where the city of Lanzhou is located.
The high-volume turnover of customers here relies on a fairly small menu, with eight soups and dry noodle dishes to choose from, plus a small selection of accompanying dumplings, buns and sides.
The recipes for these eight dishes are said by Tove Hospitality to derive from a secret recipe developed more than 100 years ago, hence the reference to 1919 in their name.
Amongst these dishes you have a Lanzhou handmade beef noodle soup, which has thinly sliced beef in it.
A variation on this is the handmade braised beef noodle soup, which contains a chunkier cut of slow-cooked beef and then you have versions with pickled cabbage or hot and spicy beef, plus dry noodle dishes with pork, lamb and chicken.
The city branch of 1919 Lanzhou Beef Noodle. Photo: Supplied.
When you order, you’ll need to make a few choices. You can select your noodle thickness and shape from a list of seven options, including thin, thinner, thinnest, thick, thicker, prism and wide. I’m not sure if the range of similar-sounding options is tongue-in-cheek, but as far as creating a sliding scale of thicknesses, it does the job.
You’ll also be asked to select your toppings from a list of three; shallots, coriander and chilli. The correct answer always being all the toppings, and yes, I’m aware that not everyone is genetically blessed in the coriander department and for those people, I commiserate.
After paying, I recommend lingering a little at the end of the counter where you can get a good view of the chef at work and think about the fact that they are hand-pulling all of those thicknesses of noodles just by varying the twists and swings of the dough. One more pull or twist of the dough and you have thin and another you have thinner or thinnest.
Stay long enough, and you’ll see the chef drop your batch of noodles into a bubbling cauldron and deftly lift out someone else’s batch with an oversized pair of chopsticks, another skill that is far harder than it looks.
For all of this hand-pulling and slow cooking, the dishes take less than 10 minutes to arrive.
Can you get better noodles or richer broths elsewhere? Of course you can; this certainly isn’t peak-noodle. You can always spend more or go further if you are hunting down the best bowl of noodle soup to have graced planet earth.
My noodle philosophy is more centered around exploring and enjoying all of the variations out there. For my taste, these noodles could be chewier with more of a toothsome spring, but without splitting hairs, which is an annoying habit of foodies, this is an accessible, fast and affordable way to eat a damn good noodle soup and one that delivers a touch of theatre to go with your dinner.
1919 Lanzhou Beef Noodle has two Canberra locations, The Canberra Centre and Westfield Belconnen.
