The pasta man

Slicing pasta.

























The tools of the trade.














On Xiwu’s ‘restaurant row’ as I like to call think of it, I have two favorite restaurants. The first of which I am writing about here. The owner and cook is from Lanzhou, which is the capitol of the Gansu in northwestern China. You can tell by his facial features that he isn’t a Han. He also doesn’t speak the local Fenghua dialect so it’s a little easier for me to communicate with him, though he isn’t much of a talker, besides he’s too busy. He has a wife and two children there. He came here because the money is better. He also happens to be one of the four males I’ve met here that don’t smoke.

I’m not sure what it is, but there is something intriguing about his steady, hard work. I’ve noticed others watching him work, though it’s not unique to him. I’ve been to two other restaurants that sell this style of noodles (oh did I finally mention what kind of food it is) in Fenghua, though this is my favorite.

He makes two dishes, though occasionally, and it seems as though he doesn’t particularly enjoy departure from his routine, makes a noodle dish w/o the broth. I like them all. He lives in the back of the restaurant in a small room where he prepares the vegetables and also has a bunk complete with a split-cane ‘mattress’ no where near as comfortable as the ones I snubbed when shopping for my own mattress. (back to the food) The two main choices are thin or wide pasta noodles. The wide noodles are made by draping a wad of dough over a dowel and slicing off thin strips into a large pot of water he keeps boiling all day. I took the photo in the middle of the afternoon, thus the smaller container of boiling water. The slices are flipped as they are cut into the pot. The second option is a small spaghetti-sized noodle that is made by stretching the dough over and over, like taffy until it is small enough. His kneading process is quite rigorous including drawing a lump of down apart horizontally between his hands and slapping down the dough drooping down between on the table. The noodles are great, I told him if you want fresh noodles like this in the U.S. you have to go to an expensive restaurant or make them yourself. So after the noodles are cooked he uses a strainer to draw them out, and fills a bowl with broth, the noodles, cilantro, I’m guessing about two ounces of sliced beef and if you want some hot pepper sauce. Per my picky western standards it isn’t quite a balanced meal, but it’s delicious, fills you up and costs 3 RMB (yes, about $.37).

I’ve been asked what they use for fuel. Generally copious amounts of gas (I’ll post some photos in the next food entry of flames making it all the way up to the top of a wok) and coal. The coal has been pressed into cylinders and is used everywhere. Most often the gas is used for fast, very hot cooking, and the coal is used for slower cooking, keeping water hot. The coal cylinders are stacked into vertical, semi-portable stoves or dumped into the ovens. Some small restaurants (for lack of a better word) use several stacks of them to produce a very hot, intense heat source. It burns quite clean. Afterward they are discarded on the street, trash bins, etc with all the other trash. These brown ones are spent.

This is a view of the oven used to heat the coal for the walk-though breakfast I wrote about earlier, which also uses these coal casks.