In the last few years, we’ve seen the rise of many Taiwanese restaurants in the Vancouver area. I’ve tried the food at everywhere from Ali Shan in Crystal Mall to Chef Hung in Aberdeen Centre, but one of the first “big” Taiwanese beef noodle restaurants is the appropriately named No. 1 Beef Noodle House.
Located in a tiny strip mall kitty corner to BCIT in Burnaby, No. 1 Beef Noodle House is lauded as one of the best places to get Taiwanese beef noodle soup. They even expanded a few years ago to open another location, called Beefy Beef Noodle House, on trendy Main Street. I’ve been there, but ironically enough, I’ve never visited the original. Until now.
There is currently a “special offer” menu that runs until April 30th. This gives you a selection of seven main dishes at a discounted price, plus the option to add one of five appetizers for $3. Appetizer choices include a deep fried pork chop, deep fried chicken wings, crispy salty peppery chicken, deep fried squid, or deep fried tofu. The regular menu had a lot of other Taiwanese specialties too, including bubble tea, dim sum, and shaved ice.
A staple of Taiwanese snack food is the salty peppery chicken, so we couldn’t resist adding this inexpensive appetizer to our meal. While the seasoning was reasonably distributed and the meat itself was quite juicy, I found that the breading wasn’t nearly as crispy as it could have been.
Shown here is the standard sliced beef brisket in noodle soup. I was pleased with the amount of meat included in the bowl and the noodles had a nice bounce to them. It wasn’t exactly breathtaking, but this is a perfectly satisfying lunch, especially for all the budget-conscious students across the street at BCIT.
Deviating from the norm is this vegetable and pork in noodle soup. The soup base is not at all like the beef broth of the regular bowl; instead, it was closer in flavor to a hot and sour soup, except that it wasn’t really all that hot nor was it all that sour. Adding in some vinegar really brought out a better flavor to go along with the sliced pork.
I wouldn’t go quite as far as to say that this is the “number one” Taiwanese beef noodle restaurant in town, it’s still a solid choice when you have a hankering for this type of cuisine. The small parking lot can get filled quite quickly, especially since there are other eateries in the same tiny strip mall, so keep that in mind when visiting.
I’ve always liked Pho, and noodle type dishes. Wong Sensei always takes us to all the Pho and other authentic Asian restaurants when we travel to martial arts events. Seeing that he is from Main Land China and owns Wong-Kai Imports which supplies them with their product I believe he knows where to take us.
Funny thing is that when we go, we never order. We sit down and all of a sudden all of these dishes are sitting in front of us. None of them from the menu. I’ve yet to eat from a menu when Wong Sensei takes us to eat.
All the different kinds of Asian soup noodles are great and they’re all so different from one another. Ramen, pho, Taiwanese beef noodle… I love them all. 🙂