Source : the age
Amy Huy wants to tell you about Xi’an. She wants to tell you about its opera and its Terracotta Army, and its 14-kilometre Ming Dynasty-era city wall.
She produces a phone and swipes to a promotional video of the city, the capital of Shaanxi province in China’s north. She and husband Boqiao Li used to live there, she says pointing – that neighbourhood, just there.
“Xi’an has more than 3000 years of history,” Yu says. “It’s the origin of the Silk Road … Beijing only had five dynasties, Xi’an had 13. We are so proud of this city.”
Every ounce of that enthusiasm seems to have been channelled into Terrific Noodles. First it was Sunnybank, with a restaurant at Market Square that opened three years ago. Now it’s on the other side of town in Chermside.
It’s decked out with vibrant murals by a Xi’an artist and gallery owner Yu refers to as Mr Ma, and an enormous front window that allows passers-by to gawk at the chefs as they slap their thick biang biang noodle dough on the kitchen counter. The restaurant is basically two people transforming a longing for their hometown into a celebration for Brisbane diners.
The Market Square restaurant, despite a slow first few months, has been an enormous hit – head there at peak time and good luck getting a table (although they tend to turn over very fast), with punters drawn by the noodle dishes’ big portions and big flavours, as well as generously stuffed, super-flaky rou jia mo (Chinese pork burgers).
It was a Westfield leasing executive who reached out to Huy and Li about a second store, but at Garden City rather than Chermside.
“I felt [Garden City] was too close to Sunnybank,” Huy says. “I thought, ‘if we’re going to open a second store, it must be north’. We wanted to introduce our food to a new audience up here.”
Terrific Noodles feels like the latest in a new wave of tenants designed to underscore Chermside’s credentials as a food destination. In the past two years it’s also welcomed a David’s Noodle & Hotpot and a Scugnizzi, although the latter was short-lived.
Huy says the restaurant has been busy since soft launching towards the end of September, and particularly since its official opening in early October. Walking through the door are both newcomers to Xi’an cuisine and homesick migrants.
“[Li] is so stubborn,” Huy says. “He said he wasn’t going to adapt any flavours: ‘I can introduce other [flavours] to suit people’s expectations, but traditional is traditional’. People can tell – it’s real, from Xi’an. I’ve had a few people speak to me in the local dialect and say they’ve never tried anything in Brisbane this authentic.”
The menu at the Chermside restaurant is mostly the same as the Sunnybank original, split into noodle soups, dry noodle dishes, cold noodle dishes, a bunch of rou jia mo, and a selection of cold sides. The portions are, as usual, huge.
Soups include a golden noodle soup with beef brisket and Chinese sauerkraut, a spicy and sour beef noodle soup, and a pork bone broth noodle soup.
There’s a stack of options on the biang biang dry noodles menu, including braised beef rib; sauteed chicken; mash potato, pork mince and sauce; and chilli with pork mince.
And the cold noodle dishes include noodles with sesame sauce; noodles with shredded chicken, cucumber in a chilli and sesame sauce; and cold noodles with a special chilli oil.
By far the most popular noodles across the menu are the wheat-based biang biang noodles, but there are also spinach biang biang noodles, thinner hand-pulled noodles, and vermicelli.
Dumplings will be added to the menu in the coming weeks.
Drinks are the same straightforward selection of sodas and juice variations that regulars will know from Market Square, and includes an Ice Peak tangerine soda imported from Xi’an. There’s also a seasonally rotating selection of sparkling sodas, which currently include grapefruit and lychee flavours.
“I really love Australian diners because they are so open to different cultures,” Huy says. “Like, some of the pho in Brisbane is just as good as Vietnam. Boqiao and I went back to Xi’an recently and ordered cold noodles – my favourite as a child – and I feel like ours is just as good, so we’re very proud.”
Open daily 11am-9pm
Shop FC611, Level 2, Westfield Chermside, Gympie Road, Chermside
Matt Shea is Food and Culture Editor at Brisbane Times. He is a former editor and editor-at-large at Broadsheet Brisbane, and has written for Escape, Qantas Magazine, the Guardian, Jetstar Magazine and SilverKris, among many others.
