Shaolin Kung Fu Noodle’s delicious and cheap hand-pulled marvels, plus other great joints where you can get your noodle fix.
Shaolin Kung Fu Noodle
Seriously good noodles, lamb dishes and flatbreads
The restaurant with the best name in the whole city also has some of the best hand-pulled noodles, spicy lamb dishes and some pretty fine flatbreads, too. The owners are from Henan province in China, and their cooking is influenced by the foods of the local Muslim community. Grab a seat and ready yourself for savoury delights. We’re very keen on the fried noodles with lamb, cumin and chilli.
636 Dominion Rd, Balmoral; 486 Queen St, central city; unit 10, 16 Gooch Plc, Somerville.
Viet Kitchen
Opened in early 2016, this family-run restaurant has a refreshingly short menu of traditional Vietnamese dishes. There’s home-style pho and banh mi but the hero is the bun bo Hue — a sour, sweet, salty and spicy beef noodle soup. Hot Vietnamese filter coffee with condensed milk is available, too, as well as whole rosebud petal tea.
342 Dominion Rd, Balmoral
Eden Noodles
You may have to queue out the door on this windy strip of Dominion Rd, but when you do get a table, it’s worth it. We can almost never go past the dan dan noodles, or the dumplings, in a spicy, sweet pool of chilli oil. The Chinese pickles on the side are a great call, too.
105 Dominion Rd, Balmoral
Ramen Do
The stock is some of the finest around, the toppings very generous and the egg yolk perfectly soft. Ramen Do has a calm feel about it: the kitchen and counter hum along without fuss, and the room, adorned with kooky realist cross-stitching, is often quite quiet save the sound of slurping, despite the fact it’s always full. Here, you needn’t spend more than $14 to feel full, though splurging on $18 braised-pork-belly ramen is worth the extra few dollars.
167 Symonds St, Central City
