January 14, 2019:

We came to Hing Noodle (慶麵) for lunch. It’s an award-winning noodle shop that also features saliva chicken and pepper pork buns.

There were lots of people crowding around the doorway when we first arrived that I mistakened it as a line-up. It turned out they were just reading the menu outside the restaurant. Once they piled into the restaurant, we did too.

It was a small restaurant with communal tables for seating and a few stools at the bar facing the kitchen. It was a small cute space. You could watch the chefs assemble wontons and other things from that vantage point.

Seeing as it was such a small restaurant, I was impressed that they actually had two individual single washrooms for the customers (one was “male” and the other was “male/female”). The ladies’ washroom was accessible by squeezing through a tight narrow space from the wall and a shelf, but the washroom itself was clean and functional inside.

We chose the Hing Noodle with Squid and Minced Shrimp Dumplings, Saliva Wined Chicken Roll (“saliva chicken” is my personal kryptonite), the Pan-fried Black Pepper Pork Buns, and Shredded Burdocks with Secret Sauce. We added a hot drink, the Roselle Honey.

The Roselle Honey drink looked like a cup of regular hot water. When I swirled the spoon around the cup, I saw roselle petals at the base of the cup and a sweet scent was emitted. The drink actually tasted very sweet and nourishing!

The Shredded Burdocks with Secret Sauce was pretty good but the burdocks require some strength in the gums to chew it all down. The sauce was tangy and salty. It made a good companion dish to the rest of our dishes (especially the salty and spicy saliva chicken rolls).

The Saliva Wined Chicken Roll (Numbing and Spicy Wined Chicken Roll) was rolls of pure chicken meat (no bones) with the ma la spicy sauce poured over it. These were boneless morsels of deliciousness! The ma la spice was just right making the tender rolls of chicken so irresistible.

The Hing Noodle with Squid and Minced Shrimp Dumplings looked like a mediocre bowl of noodles with some tofu puffs and shredded onion strings on top of the yellow noodles but it turned out to be quite a delectable noodle dish.

The squid and prawn dumplings were pretty good. The noodles were better than I expected and the broth was super tasty.

The last item were the Pan-fried Black Pepper Buns. These came in a set of two and looked amazing. They were a good size and plump with dozens of black sesame and a few green onions on top.

These were pretty good. When I bit into mine, a gush of hot soup came out. The meat was moist and tasty inside the bun. As you ate it, there was a bit of building heat too. This was again where the tangy shredded burdocks came into use.

We were one of the last ones to round out the lunch time rush. During this time, I saw the staff taking over one of the tables to assemble wontons. I watched how they wrapped the stuffing in wonton paper and sealed it with dabs of what I assumed to be an egg wash. They folded it with a few folds carefully.

The food here was pricier than the average noodle shop, but it was definitely tasty. :9