Qin West Noodle

San Diego, CA (The Joy of Food) — The namesake noodles at Qin West Noodle have an ethereal, perfect, almost sinful thing about them, nearly as weightless as they are springy, bouncy, slippery, and soft. You will find yourself still eating more of them long after you are full.

Qin West might be the best spot in southern California to try Shaanxi-style cooking, the fiery, fragrant cuisine of the central Chinese province of the same name. It is a tidy, long, narrow space in the tidy, sprawling, renovated UTC mall, and the crowds tend to be enormous. On weekends and busy times during the week everybody orders and then gathers in the front lobby, a big pile that is at least three deep, most of it hungrily staring down the counter while the food is prepared. 

I am fairly obsessed with the liangpi, a vegetarian dish of slippery wide hand-pulled noodles that’s served cold, plied with julienned cucumbers, blanched bean sprouts, and crushed peanuts sitting in a spicy, savory dressing. They are an extraordinary texture and the perfect vehicle for the in-house roasted chili oil, a ruby red so deep and rich it can permanently stain your shirt. The heat here is modulated, smoky, and subtle before it expands into a white-hot light.

Saozi noodles are a staple in the Shaanxi province, and Qin West’s version is centered around thinner, springy, chewy noodles with rich diced pork belly, tofu, potato, and daikon. Like the liangpi, you can amp this up to deliver the heat of a thousand suns. You can also ask for these either dry or with soup (I like mine dry since the noodles stay viable). 

If you order the guilin soup, you can expect rice noodles along with some tart Chinese cabbage, crunchy lily flowers, bean-curd sheets, skin-on peanuts, and bits of pickled green beans. In other words, it’s not a bowl lacking in interesting things to chew. On top is some thinly (very thinly) sliced beef shank in a funky, pungent broth that hits you with powerful notes of sweet, salty, spicy, and sour all at once. 

The wonton soup at Qin West is my preferred version in town, a simple nearly clear broth garnished with a few greens and simmered with copious amounts of garlic. Within will be at least a dozen or more wontons filled with ground pork, made in-house daily. Though the spicy entree is listed on the menu, you can also request the non-spicy version. 

The Chinese mo, short for roujiamo, means meat in a bun and is exactly that, a heap of delightfully stewed pork (or spicy beef) held together by two steamed flatbread skins that are texturally interesting; soft and pliable in spots and a bit tougher in others, and they serve the vital function of balancing the rich flavor of the meat. It is a popular street food and essentially the Chinese version of a Western burger. 

If wok-fired is your thing, the cumin beef is for you, enveloped with bits of char and dotted with strips of fresh and dried chiles. It’s not hard to like this dish of tender beef slices bound together with enough cumin and garlic to stay with you for days.

It is, though, easy enough to find yourself on the other end of greatness. Whether you get them panfried or steamed, it’s painfully clear the dumplings are reheated and not cooked to order. What should be a bowl of dancing crispy wontons (or slippery wontons if we’re talking steamed) is listless and sad, lacking the nuanced crevices that dumplings are known for. With no dipping sauce these are dry and on the verge of inedible. 

And, Qin West does have other drawbacks. If you worship at the altar of the pig, the cow, or the lamb, the portions of anything meat will be hit or miss, usually a miss, usually requiring a flashlight and a search party to spot the protein that’s supposed to be somewhere in your dish. The kitchen also seems to have a pretty hard time keeping things consistent, to the point of night-and-day differences. One day the food will be the temperature of molten lava, and the next you’ll wonder if they cooked it at all. One day the thing you order might be bland, and the next it can contain enough salt to float an egg.

The model here is efficient, bare bones even, and you’ll encounter almost no human interaction — music to my introverted ears — with the exception of them handing you your bag or tray of food. The menu is small but mighty, though for the uninitiated there are no descriptions. Know before you go, as they say. Everything is self-service, including throwing away trash and wiping down your table before you leave. 

This is a budget buy, as much as something can be a budget buy these days, so you will compete for seating with half the graduating class of nearby UCSD. Portions are enough for two days and, if you ask me, get even more nuanced with the passage of time. In this case, leftovers might just be the very best thing about this place.

Written by Joy

Thanks for reading. The Joy of Food blog celebrates eating well, traveling often, and living la dolce vita. San Diego, California is home base, but thoughts are from all over. Reviews and photos help to highlight wonderful (or not) food experiences from around the world.

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