Taste of Guizhou 贵州味道 [Boston, MA]

Yes I scooped everyone AGAIN! 3 times in 2 weeks! Obviously you guys aren’t doing your jobs!

This place is so low key they are not even listed on Yelp. Like my last find, A Lee 88, they still have the old signage, and even the murals inside are from the previous restaurant. (Wing It, since 1986.)

The name is “Taste of Guizhou” and the Chinese is the same, Guizhou Taste. 贵州 味道

You have never had this because this is the first Guizhou restaurant in Boston. The menu is simple, noodle dishes and the star is the emblematic Guizhou Huaxi Beef Noodle Soup. You can not have rice noodle but that would be strange. Huaxi is part of Guiyang, the capitol of Guizhou. The rice noodles here have a great bite and bounce back when they hit the table and like all rice noodle in soup, stay firm. The broth, which I suggest delicately savoring a bit before disturbing the other side of the bowl where the sour cabbage lies, is subtle but complex in seasoning. The beef slices, something lean, like eye round, flank, or chuck perhaps, are topped off with very fragrant and what must be freshly ground white pepper. The sour cabbage pieces shimmering beneath the surface along one side give the bowl a tangy spruce. I’ve only had Yunnan style rice noodle soups, and while Yunnan and Guizhou are neighbors, this is very different. It would have been nice to have some chili oil to add in, as that is customary but I enjoyed my first bowl unadorned as to appreciate it’s core essences.

The family owners are from Guiyang, the capital of this landlocked province. While most Chinese from the coastal provinces think Guizhou as “back country” and it is, Guiyang has 5 million people, double Boston’s entire metro area, and boasts many more high rises than Boston will ever have. Still it is somewhat less common to see southwestern Chinese people in the US, so I was very excited to spot this under everyone’s nose! The restaurant has been operating for two months already. While some of expat Boston University students have found there way, it’s still very much down low. I ate alone at dinner primetime hour, except when the father, mother, and son stepped in to have dinner themselves. There is one other cook. There were no phone calls or online orders. I helped a woman who walked in order, she thought it was still “Wing It” the former chicken wing place. What did I steer her to? Chicken, of course!

Which brings me to their other offering, “Hot Chicken Stew”. I suspected it was Xinjiang Big Plate Chicken and I was right. It had the wide belt noodles on the bottom, which were frankly a little soggy, but the potatoes and chicken were great. It is very advantageous to get this in 3 different sizes, usually if you see this on a menu, it’s really one size, and it’s big, hence it’s name. Getting a single serve size to go is very convenient. You can eat it in your car and pretend you are a Xinjiang truck driver, the people who this dish was invented for on the side of a highway in the 1980’s. Big Plate Chicken or Da Pan Ji 大盘鸡 is one of those China-wide dishes found all over the country, like Ma Po Tofu. It’s been available in Boston for some time, since Chef Chang’s and Shaanxi Gourmet debuted some years back, but never in varying sizes, or on rice, which might be the better way to get it here.

Guizhou Taste offers 4 variations on the noodle soups, and other types of noodles are available if you so desire. A cold noodle dish is only $8.85 while the Huaxi version is $13.45. This is ideal student dining! It was sad to see a few Chinese students walk by, not even looking in the window, because they think it’s still chicken wings! Also on the menu, stir-fried snails, tofu ball, dough stick wrapped in flour tortilla, and sticky rice with sausage. Lunch combos are a mere $7.45! Anything else? Yea, some salads, and fried rices. That’s it!

Taste of Guizhou is a very bare-bones offering of a few of Guizhou’s specialties, but they can grow in time. Very few modifications have been done, except tables and chairs, and many of the consumables, including the printed menus, have been furnished by the delivery app companies. Come for the Huaxi noodle soup, stay for the big plate chicken! They close at 8:30pm and are not open Mondays. Order online from Hungry Panda, Ricepo, Seamless, et al.

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Menu

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They are daring, I must say. We in the SF Bay Area have a relatively large Chinese population and there are still only 2 or 3 Guizhou restaurants.

And I still don’t quite know what a Guizhou beef noodle soup should be like. We have two such noodle places nearby. And they serve two completely different broth. One of them taste like this soap so its a bit of an acquired taste. The other is a bit more ‘mainstream’. They both got a bit of Chinese herbal medicine taste to it.

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Next up, is Leishan Sour Fish Soup! I can’t wait! The soup stock is a month old fermented fish and chili pepper.

Here’s a video of a couple Guizhou noodle soups being made in Flushing, in the New York Food Court on Roosevelt kinda close to Asian Jewels. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAzgQ2pVO7I
It’s most in Chinese and no translation available. But you can see a spicy chicken version and the beef one.

And here is a video of sour fish soup stock being made in Leishan County, Guizhou. It’s similar to Doubanjiang in that it’s fermented in jars. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_revKMN2eOI

Taste of Guizhou has these versions so I will try them out. @sck there is some secret herbal mix and it seems to vary from locale to locale.

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thanks especially for the menu! I checked out their website after your Instagram post and they had nothin’!

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Yes their website is useless except for hours and address. But their menu exists on many delivery apps. A curious thing I didn’t mention is that their doorway is covered with asian delivery app placards, it’s like NASCAR. The window signs with pictures of food are delivery app provided, the paper menus too. Pretty soon I’ll expect the disposable bowls will say RICEPO or HUNGRY PANDA! lol. Another curious thing is that their is a small selection of books by the register and it’s from the “Chinese Boston Library Association” or something like that.

https://www.seamless.com/menu/taste-of-guizhou-1153-commonwealth-avenue-boston/3121403

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I’ve created a yelp listing for them

Maybe I should be a restaurant consultant lol

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This is from Postmates food delivery service. I can’t discern if these are from the internet or they actually shot their own food. But gives you and idea about the spread of Guizhou offerings they have for now.

Ah crap I have VPN on so the prices are in Canadian dollars sorry

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I figured there was no time like the present to get back in the saddle (or to mix metaphors, I guess) so I hightailed it over on the 66 bus and checked this place out for lunch today. Thought I should try the standard Guizhou beef noodle, and it was pretty darn good. I guess it was the mother who made my rice noodles, & they were cooked perfectly. The broth was definitely subtle, you had said so but I was still surprised how restrained it was. Delicious though, and really I loved the sour cabbage that was in here, too. It might have been my favorite thing in the dish!

Went to Yi Soon for a hot dog bun and and egg tart while I was over here. Love that little place! I also tried to go into Berezka to get some smoked fish, but I swear there is something about this market where unless you’re an 80 year old Russian American woman, you are completely invisible to people behind the counter. I just cut out after standing there for five minutes while the woman talked on the phone.

I also stuck my head into the 88 and looked at Kantin–I didn’t really know about this place before seeing it in that 30 comfort foods piece. Looked like OK HK style duck/pork plates. I didn’t try it since I had just eaten soup and didn’t feel like carrying this stuff on my walk back over the BU bridge (I’ve had duck blowouts before bringing roasted meats back from Chinatown, it’s not pretty) but I’ll take a crack at it someday.

My pic isn’t as good as yours (that’s not a filter folks, it’s just the lens on my crappy phone steaming up, haha) but here it is anyway for proof I really went. And yeah, I sure didn’t have to worry much about being exposed to any coronavirus when I was in there–the place was a ghost town, no one else even came in while I was eating lunch. They won’t last long if business is always like that, unfortunately.

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I’m there now! Guess I missed you.

I ordered seafood soup and the fried tofu fish ball.

The seafood soup is not the famous Sour Fish soup, but it is available! It feeds 2-3 people, is not on the menu and you have to call ahead.

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ha, yeah I went early. Too bad about the sour fish soup, that sounds so promising. Don’t know when I’ll get there with 3 people who are ready for fermented fish!

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Well good for you for getting back out there in the real world!

Latest pics! My shooting phone is an iPhone 6 believe it or not but I happen to be a professional photographer. (Not my main job tho.)

It sure is darn quiet in here. I just noticed the floor mats are Chowbus and Hungry Panda lol. They should just become a Chinese Sysco lol

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Hmmm, those weirdly broke here but I looked at your Instagram and now I wish I had ordered those fish balls.

I meant to ask: on the spice mix that’s on the beef soup, you said maybe there was white pepper. Is there prickly ash or something in there too? I didn’t get a lot of mouth numbing, but there was a crunchy citrusy note that reminded me of it. There were some black flecks too that I couldn’t place, didn’t seem like black pepper. Not totally sure just what that spice mix was.

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I think you are right about Sichuan peppercorn!

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I had Guizhou food once in Kuala Lumpur. Still recovering from it.

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That looks full on spread! Excellent write-up I wish we saw more of that here!

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In a bizarre twist, the website for “Wing It” still exists…and it has big plate chicken and rice noodles in the slide show. Looking at this online menu, it seems there was a crossover period where they served wings…and Guizhou food…at the same time.

https://order.mealkeyway.com/merchant/5a684c7445567346714966704e4f394e6c7a467268673d3d/main

The very last Yelp review for Wing It states that the yelper didn’t know about the wings, but the chinese food was really good lol

Now that would have been a scoop of scoops, to find out that Wing It was serving Guizhou food on the down low

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Kantins dry fried beef chow foon is quite good but they run out later in the day. go early

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I got published in Eater about Taste of Guizhou. Guess I’m legit now

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Thanks for sharing. That was a fun read.

PS I don’t need Eater to tell me you’re legit. :wink:

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