The earthenware bowl arrives filled with fragrant broth, loaded with rice noodles, topped with shrimp and pork, then dotted with bean sprouts, onions, cherry tomatoes, cilantro, basil and lime on the side. It’s tangy, spicy, crunchy and savory, and it will chase the winter blues right out the door.
If there’s a better chill-busting, soul-warming dish than Rice Monkeys’ Saigon noodles, tell me quick, because it’s January and a girl needs all the help she can get to make it until the first green leaf appears.
Maybe you’re not in the soupy, slurpy mood, but crave a richer, earthier dish to pull you through to, well, at least the end of the day. The wide bowl of bucatini pasta dressed with delectable sauteed mushrooms and sweet bay scallops in a buttery, creamy sauce (ask for extra Parmesan to make it even more decadent) will lift your spirits until the weather warms up. It’s always a best-seller at Guido’s Favorite Foods, but winter becomes it.
Pasta can be long and thin, short and plump, filled or plain and good for anything from a hearty pre-work breakfast to a light midnight snack. Whatever the form, whatever the occasion, noodles feel like home.
“It makes you happy,” said Amber Jacin, general manager of Guido’s and the daughter of owners Susan and Sean Devereaux. “You feel like you’re with family when you eat it.”
Archaeologists carbon-dated noodle remnants in earthen bowls found near the Yellow River in China back six millennia, but the first written record of the dish crops up there a mere 2,200 years ago. They appear in the Jewish Talmud about 400 years later and spread through the Middle East during the Dark Ages. They don’t become prominent in Europe until Marco Polo visits China in the 13th century.
Almost every country has its favorite version of noodles, from the simplest – egg noodles with butter and salt in Austria – to the most complicated, like long-simmered Italian sauces made with three meats and four vegetables, and to the most exotic, found in China and Japan and requiring ingredients from rare and endangered species.
Noodles are even available to folks who can’t, or won’t, eat wheat. Most Asian dishes use noodles made from rice or beans, although the most popular dish on the planet, ramen, is made from high-alkaline wheat. (You can’t substitute rice noodles – the texture is completely different.)
But if you’re hankering for a good old-fashioned dish of pasta, and rice noodles just won’t cut it, Roxanne Riccardi can fill the bill and your bowl. She makes stunning gluten-free ravioli with cheese or vegetables or meat at her inconspicuous shop in College Plaza, plus lasagna and fresh spaghetti and fettuccine to take home.
Riccardi grew up in an Italian family, making pastas like shell-shaped cavatelli and potato-based gnocchi with her grandmother on Saturday to go into the big family meal on Sunday.
“If you’re Italian, it’s what you want. It’s good, it’s home, it’s love,” she said.
For the younger set, noodles have another benefit – they’re affordable.
“I like them because they’re cheap,” said Luke Mulligan, who graduated from college not too long ago and now manages the bar at Mutu’s Italian Kitchen. “I lived for years on a noodle diet.”
Noodle dishes tend to be forgiving, able to accommodate the ingredients you have on hand – no parsley for the red sauce, basil will do just fine; no shiitakes for the stir-fry, cremini will work as well. In the popular vernacular, it’s all good.
Local restaurateurs say noodles are a year-round best-seller but do really well in winter. And homemade is always best. Both Jacin of Guido’s and Rustin Newton, owner of Mutu’s, say they consistently sell out of specials featuring house-made pastas. (Most pastas at local eateries, regardless of ethnic origin, are purchased.) Newton’s big hit was Porcini Linguine in a porcini cream sauce topped with grilled filet. At Guido’s, customers gobble up the hand-rolled raviolis stuffed with a luscious pork filling.
But if you’re looking for one of the richest, deepest pork-flavored meals around, East by Southwest creates a ramen stock of pig trotters, belly and bones that takes 12 hours to cook and infuses the simple noodle soup with a depth of flavor that’s hard to find.
Owner Sergio Verduzco studied the different regional ramen specialties in Japan and settled on the one from Tokyo, which also includes dried shiitakes and kombu, a dried seaweed, to boost its umami factor.
For Verduzco, noodles are simply the vehicle to deliver the intense flavor he creates in his stocks and sauces, whether that’s for the beefy Vietnamese Pho, the killer Thai Street Noodles or his tangy but delicate pad Thai, his customers’ favorite.
As to why noodles are such a popular meal, Verduzco grins and hazards a guess.
“I think people like slurping them,” he said. “You can pick them up. They’re fun to eat.”
Those of us accustomed to avoiding pasta because of its high carbohydrate load might not think of noodles as a particularly diet-worthy dish, yet the Asian people are the trimmest in the world. One lithe young woman waiting for her order at Rice Monkeys touted its healthful options and said she lost 15 pounds by eating there.
While the restaurant is a haven for sushi lovers, noodles account for fully half of its sales, co-owner Jimmy Nguyen said. The noodle dishes he offers reflect his Vietnamese heritage and the traditional foods one would find in any Vietnamese home. He waxed rhapsodic, recounting the flavorful meals his mother prepared for him when he visited her over the holidays – from the cold noodle dish called Bun to an enormous open grill featuring meats and vegetables of all kinds to be assembled into customized summer rolls.
He, too, can’t help but smiling when asked why noodles are such a universally beloved dish.
“The smell, the aroma, the Pho …” he trails off in reverie. “We have to have it. It’s a daily kind of thing.”
So there you have it. We can’t do anything about winter’s bitter cold, but a hot bowl of noodles can carry us through until the flowers bloom again.
phasterok@durangoherald.com
