Fortune Noodle House dan dan noodles

They’re not hand-pulling the noodles at Fortune Noodle House anymore. They will again someday, but they can’t find enough workers to concentrate on such a time-intensive process right now. So says Rachel Sun, who co-owns the Clifton Heights restaurant with her husband, Steven. Hand-pulled noodles are more about theatrics, though. They're a northern Chinese tradition that dates back 4,000 years. 

While you may not see anyone practicing that tradition the way you can in the Chinatown restaurants of New York City or San Francisco, the food here is right on par with those places. Even with a regular old dough maker, the noodles are still excellent. As springy and chewy and downright delicious as you could hope for. 

Case in point was the Szechuan dan dan noodles I tried the other day. They came in a big and beautiful ceramic bowl, tossed with just the right amount of chili oil. That oil, made with a combination of peppers (Szechuan included) was more about balance than hot-sauce-competition heat.

[Crave more? Check out the tasty stuff Keith has been writing about lately🍽️]

The dish arrived with a large dollop of minced pork ground into paste-like form with toasted sesame seeds and peanuts. Aside from the noodles, what I loved most were the large, (very) roughly chopped bits of garlic in almost every bite, the heavy hit of cilantro, the savory but not too salty bits of pork.

Tossing everything together with my fork (I didn’t see the chopsticks they’d placed on the table until I was nearly finished), I took a bite and thanked God above that the food here was as good as I'd always heard it was. This was my first time at Fortune Noodle House, you see. And while I’d been told it was fantastic by people whose tastes I trust, that tiny bit of snobbish New Yorker that I just can’t shake gave me some doubts.