My Quest for Beef Noodle Soup

A few months ago, I fell down a rabbit hole. Actually, it was a noodle hole.

It all started with an Instagram photo: a bowl of steaming beef broth as clear as a polished window, with a tight coil of noodles, a crimson puddle of chile oil, thin shingles of beef and radish, and cilantro leaves peeking through the broth. The whole thing was so cartoonishly pristine it seemed ripped from an anime series.

That image touched off an obsession in the way only an alluring picture of noodles you randomly scroll past on the internet can. I had never even tasted the dish — called Lanzhou lamian, or Lanzhou beef noodle soup — yet it had all the makings of my new favorite food.

I went into research-paper mode, and learned that this wasn’t just any regional dish. Several historians told me about Ma Baozi, a Hui Muslim from Lanzhou, a city in northwestern China, who in 1915 began selling a translucent beef soup with hand-pulled noodles; it proved a staple business for Hui Muslims, and later became hugely popular throughout the country as inexpensive, filling breakfast food. I watched mesmerizing videos of chefs pounding and stretching noodles by hand at a school in Lanzhou, where people travel from across the world to master the craft of noodle pulling. And then I ate 16 bowls of noodles.

Lanzhou is not exactly a tourist destination, and its beef noodles are not as widely known outside China as dishes like mapo tofu or dan dan noodles. But in recent decades, the dish has begun to go the way of pad Thai. Local government officials in China have promoted it — subsidizing Lanzhou noodle restaurants and touting the city’s noodle schools — to stimulate tourism and economic development, said Christopher St. Cavish, a food writer in Shanghai.

Lanzhou noodle restaurants have opened over the past decade or two in cities like London, Sydney and New York, where there are several new shops. The soup’s popularity grows even as Hui Muslims flee political oppression in China. Some have immigrated to Queens, finding refuge at shelters serving the dish.

Everyone I spoke to had a differing opinion about the ideal version. “Balanced and very aromatic, yet not overly exciting,” said Wei Guo, who grew up in Lanzhou and runs the Chinese food blog Red House Spice.

Lucas Sin, a chef in Shanghai told me, “You should be able to really taste the skill of the chef, and the way the noodles are being pulled.” And Carolyn Phillips, a food historian and cookbook author who specializes in Chinese cuisine, said the soup “should be flavored subtly but uniquely with spices and herbs.”

I kept all that in mind as I flitted across this frigid city and slurped bowl after bowl, my frosty cheeks thawing in the steam of each broth. Here are the three restaurants whose distinctive soups most jolted my senses awake — and the reasons you might visit them.

For Technique and Tradition

1915 Lanzhou Hand Pulled Noodles

It was the noodle show that brought me into this brightly lit box of a restaurant in the Kips Bay neighborhood of Manhattan. Cooks behind a glass pane pounded logs of shiny dough against a table, then massaged and twisted it like taffy, using their index fingers to separate the dough into long strands, as if playing a complex game of cat’s cradle. This dough contains wheat flour, water and a special ingredient: péng huī, an alkaline powder that provides extra elasticity and bite.

These glossy, glutinous noodles bounced as I tugged them out of the bowl, fighting back as I ate them. The menu lets you choose the thickness of your noodles — my favorites were as thin and flat as garlic chives.

The translucent broth was just as arresting, its beefy funk hitting my nose even before the bowl hit the table. The cooks spend six to eight hours simmering this broth, which contains beef bones (from Australian cows, which the kitchen manager, Jay Yang, told me taste “beefier”), ginger, Sichuan peppercorn, cinnamon, star anise and at least a dozen other spices. The chile oil was fruity and fragrant; it sang but didn’t sting. The gelatinous slices of beef shank reminded me of a superior pot roast.

Zong Li, an immigrant from Tianshui, about 200 miles southeast of Lanzhou, opened the shop last February in homage to her grandparents’ noodle shop. She regularly video-calls her grandparents (now retired) to make sure the cooks are following their recipes precisely.

The lines can get long at her shop, which is small and adorned sparsely with photos of noodle-pulling. But who needs pictures when you can watch the thrilling process live?

For a Restorative Break

Old Sport Food

Surrounded by houses on a quiet block of Forest Hills, Queens, this feels more like a spa than a restaurant. There are cute flower pots, soft muzak, a soothing video loop of a cook pulling noodles — and the homey Lanzhou beef noodle soup, which combines the delicate complexity of pho with a sweet-salty edge bolstered by chile oil.

The owner, Mustafa Sun, is a former architect from Beijing. His artistic skills are evident in the stylish noodle doodles he draws on the blackboard outside the restaurant each day. A Hui Muslim himself, he opened Old Sport last April to promote halal Chinese food. It’s one of the few shops I found that serves a halal rendition of the soup staying true to the dish’s Hui Muslim roots.

On my second visit, Mr. Sun showed me a bucket in which he had just combined 20 spices — including peppercorns, cinnamon, star anise and bay leaf — with salt and sugar. The blend is bloomed in a little broth, and just before the soup is served, it’s spooned over the top to lend a burst of sinus-clearing warmth. This broth, which cooks for three hours, was the one I most wanted to sip from a cup.

The thin noodles (the only size offered, and pulled to order) were as tensile as guitar strings, the result of Mr. Sun’s testing more than 10 kinds of wheat flour until he found one that produced sturdy, unyielding noodles. Both the flaps of beef shank and peppery radish turned rich and supple after a short swim in the broth, the cluster of cilantro and scallions providing some verve.

For a Jolt of Umami

Lanzhou Handmade Noodles

At the bustling food court inside New World Mall in Flushing, Queens, you can find pad kee mao from Thailand, udon from Japan and tingly xiao mian from Chongqing, China. But the stall with some of the steadiest lines is Lanzhou Handmade Noodles, which opened in 2016. The owner, Jian Lin, is from Fuzhou, whose immigrants make up a large segment of the population of Manhattan’s Chinatown. (Mr. Lin used to frequent 88 Lan Zhou on Bowery Street, a local favorite, before it closed in 2020).

Here, the noodles are chubby squiggles, pulled to order and served in a broth that simmers for 12 hours, if you’re still keeping count. This soup is cloudier, richer and more savory than its clear counterparts; Mr. Lin said he has adapted to his customers, who are mostly from northern China and prefer spicy, heavy flavors. He uses both beef bones and chicken in the broth, buying older chickens, he said, because the meat is more pungent.

The chile oil packs a fervid, MSG-like punch — it was the only one that made me sweat. (Mr. Lin would reveal only one ingredient: white pepper.) The thin slices of radish were replaced by a meaty hunk of bok choy, as he doesn’t like the sweetness of radish.

“It’s giving Shin Ramyun,” said one of my friends. She was right: It contained all the salty, hangover-curing satisfaction of packaged noodles.

Traditionalists may be skeptical of Mr. Lin’s cloudy, spicy Lanzhou beef noodles. But Mr. St. Cavish, the Shanghai food writer, said similar versions are becoming popular in Lanzhou itself.

“This is an ongoing evolution,” he said. “Nobody can pick a bowl from Lanzhou and say, ‘This is the archetypal bowl of Lanzhou beef soup.’”

But if I had to pick a favorite, it would be Old Sport, for its bracing, fortifying, yet light broth. You may prefer a different version of the dish altogether — and that’s the whole point.

1915 Lanzhou Hand Pulled Noodles 207 East 26th Street (Third Avenue), Kips Bay; 917-828-7384; 1915lanzhounoodles.com

Old Sport Food 67-03 Austin Street, (67th Avenue), Forest Hills, Queens; 929-296-0009; oldsportfoodflushing.com

Lanzhou Handmade Noodles 133-35 Roosevelt Avenue (College Point Boulevard), Flushing, Queens; 917-607-9188; lanzhou.uorder.io

Mantai Chow, Amanda Choy, Yuan Wang and Thomas Zhang contributed translation and reporting.