Tingling Sichuan flavours at Noodle Alley
A new restaurant in Manchester's Chinatown and some musings on the sensory experience of eating
When you eat, all your senses are involved to varying degrees. The most obvious is taste. Whatever you are eating needs to taste good, doesn’t it? Flavour can also tell you something about where food comes from. While all cuisines share the primary flavours of things like lamb or rice or tomatoes, even these basics can taste quite different depending on how far the ingredients have travelled to the pan they end up in, how they have been cooked and what other flavours from spices, herbs or local fruit and veg have got involved. Has a tomato’s flavour intensified from the long slow bubbling of an Italian ragu or been chopped up moments from a greenhouse into a juicy, alive-tasting salsa, sharp with lime and coriander? Has a grill imbued that smoky, charred flavour into a hunk of bone-in meat or has it been roasted til crisp, its fat bubbling around the edges?
The right glass of wine or beer or even tea will enhance the experience, as will the setting. Anyone who’s sat outside on a balmy evening eating fresh shellfish with the scent of the nearby sea in their nostrils can attest to this. Equally, the smell of stale fat, a nearby loo, or other unwanted whiffs can impair your enjoyment. Scent is a sense so tightly entwined with taste that it can be hard to unravel the two. Who hasn’t been seduced by the scent of freshly baked bread twirling out of a bakery window or the heady waft of a chopping board full of minced garlic that’s just hit sizzling butter as you walk past the back door of an Italian restaurant? If you’re lucky to be on your way into either of these places, that olfactory anticipation just adds to the pleasure of the meal. If you’re on your way to work, it might make you a little bit dejected about your foil-wrapped cheese butty, or inspire a teatime treat for later.
But back to that table by the sea, or maybe a newspaper-wrapped pile of fish and chips eaten on a stone step near Blackpool beach, or the sterile atmosphere of a long haul flight and its compartmentalised dinner trays (something I have quite a fetish for). What your food looks like and what you can see around you while you eat can have a huge effect on the pleasure, or lack of it, that a meal provides.
What about sounds? The sound of the waves crashing on the pebbles, the buzz and chatter of a London gastro pub, the TV blaring as you eat your tea on your lap. Or more closely related to the food itself, the crunch of a slice of freshly buttered toast, the scraping of knives and forks on a plate, the sense of achievement when you turn the oven off after a few hours of Xmas day cooking, the fan whirrs to a halt and that one less bit of white noise is present.
The last one is touch. I suppose this is where texture comes in, and why some people don’t like bananas or oysters but most people like crisps and many Chinese people like pigs ears. How overcooked vegetables can totally spoil their joy but also bring a sense of nostalgia that creates forgiveness. For cooks, the feel of unwrapping wax paper, of peeling potatoes, of whacking a clove of garlic with a big knife, of sprinkling herbs, of running your finger along the scales of a fresh fish. Maybe some elements of touch are the cook’s pleasurable sense more than the eater’s.
But some foods bring something uniquely sensory in this touch category. I’m thinking of the foods that bite, in the most enjoyable way. The burn of chilli, that rush of adrenaline it creates. Some say it’s an aphrodisiac. I have certainly felt a sense of euphoria from it. I think that’s why, once you get a taste for it, get past the pain and start to enjoy it, kind of like feeling the burn in the gym, it becomes addictive.
Another food that I would put in this category but that isn’t quite the same as chilli is Sichuan pepper. Many people reading this will know exactly what I mean but some of you might never have tried it. To me, the sensation of Sichuan pepper on the lips is somewhere between popping candy and a visit to the dentist. It’s an oxymoron in that it both numbs and tingles. And like chilli, I reckon I could get addicted to it.
There have always been Sichuan restaurants in Manchester but a new one Noodle Alley has won me over big time. I was intrigued by pictures of its handmade pork ravioli on Instagram and when I finally got a chance to head there for lunch I found so much more to love, quickly returning again a few days later. The noodles here are made freshly on site every day - mostly with help from machines, hand pulling isn’t practical in terms of volume and space. The other main draw is their house chilli oil made with that uniquely fragrant, numbing Sichuan pepper. It features in almost every dish.
The aforementioned ‘pork ravioli’ is actually on the menu as pork wontons under the dry noodles section. It’s a bowl of steamed wontons in chilli sauce that I greedily ate all to myself but would make a perfect sharing dish. There are softer pork dumplings in a small bowl of chilli oil too, crimped half moons folded around lozenge-shaped pieces of pork mince. The century egg - essentially a preserved egg, not really a hundred years old and not pickled but preserved in a muddy mixture of clay, ash, salt and other things - is served with chargrilled chilli and more of that tasty oil. A fellow food blogger who knows more about these things than I do urged me to make it clear that century eggs are not suitable for pregnant women due to them sometimes having residues of lead in them - though rules are apparently more stringent these days.
Two bowls of noodles have been ticked off my list. The incredible Wan Za Mian, fresh noodles doused in chilli oil and topped with buttery soft yellow peas (like smaller chickpeas), spiced minced pork and steamed pak choi is a house special you have to try if you go. A steaming bowl of beef brisket noodles tastes like it’s doing you the world of good. Not as soupy as its place on the soup noodles section may suggest, but soupy all the same, the broth is a smoky, meaty embrace topped with slow-cooked brisket and bamboo.
Deep fried “wavy” (read: crinkle cut) potato chips I can take or leave. They remind me of something from my youth I can’t quite put my finger on, the fatty kind of chips, stodgy, dark brown and sprinkled with a delicious mix of chilli, Sichuan pepper and spices that is their redeeming feature. A surefire belly filler if you have a big appetite. But it’s the cold poached chicken that really wins the day (thanks to Stan Chow and Jim Wilson for the tip off). A generous portion considering it’s on the small plates section, this would do you for lunch in itself. Shredded, cold poached chicken glossed up in more of that flavour packed chilli oil on a bed of cucumber ribbons topped with crushed peanuts and sesame seeds. A complete meal with all of that Novocaine-meets-Fizz-Wiz sensation you’re looking for.
As we ate on our last visit, we sat and watched two women deftly making pork ravioli. As someone who loves cooking but gets all in a muddle with fiddly things like this, it’s a joy to watch these masters chatting away while snipping up chunks of pork mince with chopsticks and wrapping them up in pasta squares to make perfect tortellini shapes in a split second one after another. I asked if I could take their photo and they graciously obliged.
Sichuan is not yet mainstream here in the UK but it’s definitely on the up. Hugely popular in China - apparently now taken over from Cantonese as the most popular type of cuisine there - Manchester’s huge Chinese student population are heading to Noodle Alley in droves. But the owners want to appeal to locals too so here is my small part in encouraging you to go here and try it. Let me know if you do and what you think.
Join the conversation in the comments below:
What sensory experiences come to mind when you think of food?
Have you tried Sichuan pepper and how would you describe it?