Linda Falkenstein
Minced pork and soybean paste over wide noodles from Ru Yi.
Ru Yi Hand Pulled Noodle knew how to make friends fast — with an offer of 20 percent off everything on the menu for the restaurant’s inaugural month. And the place has been hopping — with tables filled even at the blah time of 2:30 p.m. Now well past that inaugural month, there’s still a steady stream of customers.
It’s one of several locally owned Asian eateries that have come to State Street in the last couple of years — Chen’s Dumpling House and Taiwan Little Eats among them — that are not aimed at middle-American tastes.
Ru Yi’s specialty, as its name makes clear, is hand-pulled noodles. It’s easy to spy the staff pulling the noodles in the open kitchen behind the ordering counter, a somewhat ungainly process where the noodles keep getting longer and longer. The cooks clearly know what they are doing. These hand-pulled Langzhou-style noodles originate in Gansu province in central China, and owners Chaofu Lin and Xia Jia studied the craft for a year there.
Thanks to the intense pulling or working of the dough, the noodles turn out extra springy, maybe even a little chewy, without being gummy. If you do takeout, your noodles (kindly packed separately from the broth) will get a little gummy. If you happen to be a fan of springy noodles, this may even be a plus.
The noodles are mostly slated for a traditional rich beef broth soup. Beef, chili oil, scallions, cilantro and white radish are the usual add-ons. At Ru Yi, the broth is clear and spiked with five spice blend. Protein options are “beef,” spicy beef, beef tripe, beef tendon, braised beef and smoky beef, plus chicken, shrimp, duck, spare rib or vegetable. The other ingredient is bok choy — no radish. Diners add their own chili oil, scallions and cilantro.
The braised beef is a classic and popular choice — tender and not without some melty fat; it’s braised in soy sauce, according to the staff, and it tastes like pot roast.
Duck was less successful — not that it tasted bad; it’s just that there was so little duck.
The vegetable soup includes a few more vegetables than the standard bok choy — broccoli and mushrooms, usually — but vegetarians should know that the broth is beef-based, the same broth as all the rest of the soups. This is not indicated on the menu. One counter staffer told me there is a second spicy vegetable soup they make that is vegetarian, but is not listed on the menu. Vegetarians, take note.
All the soups run $10-$13, depending on the protein. This seemed high in the case of the vegetable soup, which doesn’t even have one, and the scanty duck.
My favorite dish was the only entree that isn’t a soup. The minced pork and soy bean paste (zha jiang mian, a dish from Beijing) is dark brick red, almost black, with melty pork belly mixed with rich soybean paste. This is all salty umami, but mixed with the wide noodles (what the counter staff recommends) it’s less forward. It comes with a generous tease of finely shredded carrots and julienned cucumber for a necessary sweet, crunchy contrast. A scattering of scallions adds more color and more crunch. This is a homely dish, but it shows off the hand-pulled noodles well.
There are a good number of appetizers and sides at Ru Yi, but most don’t live up to the noodles. The vegetable spring roll had a lovely, shatteringly crisp exterior, but a mushy interior of mostly cabbage. A pork and a chicken egg roll were similar: crisp outside, mushy inside. Steamed crystal shrimp dumplings have a chewy, translucent wrapper, but the filling is just largish chunks of shrimp.
The steamed barbecue pork buns are standard — there’s not a lot of beef in the salty, saucy filling, without either beef or barbecue flavor. The sweetness from the sticky/fluffy bun makes a nice contrast with the salty filling, but it would be better with more beef.
A better appetizer is the pork dumpling with chives. But if it’s dumplings you want, head to Chen’s Dumpling House, a block away.
Those looking for more veggies may order the cold cucumber salad, but it is, admittedly, just chunks of cucumber in vinegar soy sauce.
How you feel about Ru Yi will ultimately depend on how crazy you are about noodles and how much you like beef noodle soup. The soups vary so little, it’s kind of a make-or-break proposition.
Ru Yi Hand Pulled Noodle
334 State St.; 608-298-7669; ruyihandpullednoodle.weebly.com;
11 am-9pm Sun.-Thurs., 11 am-10 pm Fri.-Sat.; $5-$13
