No. 1, Zhongshan Heng Rd, Xinxing Dist
高雄市新興區中山橫路1號
(07)285-3165
Monday-Sunday
10:30am-7:00pm
English friendly: no
vegetarian friendly: no
average cost: 50-100NTD
I've been trying to figure out how to translate the name of this restaurant for a while now, and decided to give up. I doubt anybody uses its Chinese name anyway: to everyone I've talked to, it is "the duck noodle place", or (if one has to be specific) "the duck noodle place right outside exit 01 of the Formosa Boulevard KMRT station."
This is great for me, because I live right outside exit 01 of the Formosa Boulevard KMRT station. Yet somehow I hadn't eaten at this extremely famous (in business for 60 years and counting!) duck noodle stall until this afternoon, when a group of friends decided to go there for lunch. It was noonish on a Sunday, and as you can see the place was PACKED. Still, we lucked out and got a table in under five minutes.
Their menu is short but sweet: a limited variety of noodles to be topped with duck meat, shredded pork, wontons, or pig heart, in soup or in sauce. And yet the menu is still longer than it should be, because every single one of you is going to order duck noodles like we did.
We also got a plate of 滷味 ("stewed things") to start, which I believe consisted of extra-firm tofu and some random bits of duck. These included some really choice fatty pieces, as well as firmer dark meat, and the tofu was perfectly good! Nothing too special, but I was really hungry so I enjoyed it quite a bit.
For those who like noodles in soup, here are some duck noodles in soup! In a concerted effort to protect myself from Taiwanese creeping blandness disease, I'm trying to stay away from soups that were not initially conceived of as soups, so I went with the sauce option instead:
I think this may be one of the most beautiful pictures of noodles I've ever taken. The natural lighting probably helped, but so did the fact that they were absolutely delicious. The noodles themselves, though not handmade, were cooked to the perfect consistency. And once I mixed them up in the sauce...
...they attained noodle nirvana. The mouthfeel and all that junk were just spot on. My only complaint would be (can you see it coming?) that they were the tiniest bit bland, but a spoonful of hot pepper sauce went a good way towards alleviating this ailment.
And the duck! Very rarely does a piece of meat strike me as "significantly better than any other piece of meat", but the chunks of duck pictured above tasted like the dark meat off a Thanksgiving turkey, or like the drumsticks off a supermarket rotisserie chicken... Good, is what I'm getting at. SINFULLY good. And served in very generous portions, as you can see.
There's a reason this place has been around for 60+ years! And at such crazy low prices, in such a crazy convenient location, there's no reason you shouldn't stop by to try it out.
OVERALL RATING: 4/5
No comments:
Post a Comment