Today’s internet rabbit hole trip was sponsored by a dish listed on the menu at Skyiew Noodle & Tea in Pittburg. The #5, 安徽牛肉板面 Anhui Beef Plate Noodles look delicious from the photos. Has anyone tried this dish there or elsewhere? If its extra encouragement to go there, they appear to use hand-pulled noodles of some sort and list knife shaved noodles for other dishes.
Here’s what I dug up from the web about the dish. I’m not so clear on the defining features/flavors or the history of this dish. It seems you melt butter/suet and oil, infuse dry and wet aromatics in it, braise beef and chilies in it, simmer the strained solids in a water and tomato sauce (ketchup?) mixture, and serve the soup with a boiled egg and other stuff. Those seem to be the core elements, but even these four recipes are very different. Skyview looks to be topped with pickled vegetables and not have an egg.
- https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=zh-CN&u=http://home.meishichina.com/recipe-243107.html&prev=search
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rN-jGjELZ9s
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1mtTB-sgmY
- https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=zh-CN&u=http://ganxieni11.blog.sohu.com/279433616.html&prev=search
To my knowledge, this is the first restaurant in the Bay Area to advertise a dish from Anhui, an area often described for having one of China’s eight culinary traditions. There’s overlap between Anhui cuisine and that in the regions around Shanghai and Jiangxi, but a lot of the Anhui specialities use local ingredients that I wouldn’t expect to see here.