How London fell hard for Chinese noodles — Jay Rayner reviews two new restaurants

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Happiness is a good bowl of noodles, and right now we have many reasons to be happy. At first glance it’s a simple dish: the combining of flour and water to make a dough, which in turn is pulled or cut into ribbons, to be flicked into the roiling, bubbling waters and drained. These are augmented by toppings, either soothing or explosive. But like all the best simple things, it’s complicated. Good noodle-making is about the careful management of unseeable glutens and starches. There is the heat and depth of the liquids in which the noodles are simmered and the time they loiter there. It’s about the balance and shameless excess of the things that go on top; the crunchy chilli oils, bean pastes and crisp vegetables, applied like your mouth has been good today and deserves rewards.

A decade ago, London saw a boom in ramen shops, which then spread out across the UK, bringing us Japan’s intense way with thin noodles and creamy, collagen-rich broths made from a day’s simmering of pork bones. Now it’s the turn of regional China to show us the way. At the recently opened Noodle Inn on Soho’s Old Compton Street, dishes from Gansu province have mellifluous, come-hither names like “oil spill wide noodles with braised beef” and “knife cut noodles with minced pork in soybean paste”. There’s Greedy Sheep, just off Leicester Square, which offers customisable bowls with broths from “original” to “extra spicy” bobbing with cuts of offal and tendon. At Noodles and Beer at the bottom end of Wardour Street, they will snip a chilli and cumin-crusted braised short rib from the bone over ribbons that are the white of old piano keys. And the best thing? A properly sustaining bowl of noodles is great value.

That only adds intrigue to the quiet opening at the Peninsula hotel on Hyde Park Corner of the Little Blue Noodle Bar. The Peninsula is to cheap what Dita Von Teese is to dowdy. Rooms there start from around £1,000 a night. In its Chinese restaurant Canton Blue, of which the Little Blue Noodle Bar is an offshoot, the Peking duck is £135. And now, in the shimmering, lacquered, ultramarine cocktail bar at street level, they are serving up classy bowls of titivated noodles at £15 a pop, or £20 with a Gweilo beer.

There is an almost illicit thrill about stumbling across the affordable amid the padded, money-quilted luxury, as long as the offering is good, which it is. The menu lists just four dishes, made with various thick wheat noodles, some white, some egg yolk-yellow, all slightly chewy and eminently slurpable. They serve a dry version of dandan, with minced beef, crushed peanuts and a proper whack of chilli heat. The zha-jiang-mian brings finely chopped pork belly in a thick, dark, lick-the-bowl-clean yellow bean sauce, with crunchy raw vegetables. Deeply sauced wider noodles with squishy aubergine have an almost soothing level of blandness, as if engineered for a day that’s been just a little too much. Or there’s the prawn e-fu, in a broth heavy with ginger and spring onion. While the menu is short, I learnt only after I’d visited that there is also an off-menu dish of Peking duck noodles. If you try it, let me know.

The offer is distinguished in three ways. Firstly, there’s the quality of the ingredients. The prawns have an uncommonly taut, squeaky freshness, and the vegetables have been julienned with a fierce uniformity that would make Escoffier proud. Secondly, the service is extremely engaged. They want to know how everything is. All of the time. This is not necessarily a positive. I rather appreciate the uninterested service of Chinatown where you are merely a seat-filler and the emptied bowls speak for themselves. Finally, there is the offer of dessert, from the Canton Blue pastry section. So, after paying £15 for a bowl of noodles, you can pay £18 for an expertly made if diminutive craquelin-topped choux bun.

Out-of-context street food with high-class pâtisserie may not, however, be for everyone. A few days later, I return to Chinatown to try the recently opened Song He Lou, part of a Chinese restaurant group with a lineage dating back to 1757. It serves thin Suzhou-style noodles which look like balls of the finest silken yarn rising above the fat-dappled surface of a broth the colour of weak black tea, heavy with five spice. Loud Chinese folk music clanks about the hard-surfaced space, metal bangs against metal in the open kitchen, and the menu is an utterly bewildering mess of pictures in saturated colours.

The staff are not brilliant at explaining what’s going on here and suggest ordering a set menu as if that might be easier for all involved. Oh, and we must pay on ordering. We do as we’re told. One bowl of noodles in broth comes with a dish of crabmeat and its roe, a delightful mess of sweet, soft shellfish flesh to be mixed into the soup. Another arrives with hunks of friable braised beef and crumbly cubes of potato in an intense sticky gravy. Each is accompanied by side dishes including shredded ginger, black vinegar and lightly pickled greens. They do not ask how everything is. The seats are not padded and there is no French-style pastry section. But there are very good, ramen-like noodles with proper slurp and bite, submerged in broths which are so therapeutic they ought to be available on prescription. Song He Lou and the Little Blue Noodle Bar are very different propositions. But they are both about the way of the noodle. Both make me profoundly happy.