One Zesty Zha Jiang Mian

Zha Jiang Mian 炸酱面, otherwise known as meat sauce noodles or ‘Chinese spaghetti’ is a popular noodle dish, though there are many variations. The usual version comes with minced pork stirred fried with fermented beans.

Eating Zha Jian Mian at an authentic restaurant at China can be as interesting as watching a performance. After selecting the ingredients, the serving staff will throw each ingredient into a large bowl of noodles at an amazing speed, along with clanging sounds of the bowls.

Though we have none of this clanging locally, you can try a very good bowl of Noodle with Minced Meat & Mushroom in Spicy Sauce ($7.80) at the Eastern Restaurant.

Although it is termed Shanghainese, the selection is the typical noodle, rice and dumplings. The Zha Jiang Mian is one of the best I had, with an abundance of brown sauce over hand-pulled noodles, along with crunchy cool cucumber on the side. While most other versions can have very dry pork or tough noodles, this one comes warm and moist.

The Xiao Long Bao ($4.00 for 4 pieces) doesn’t disappoint as well. As their signature dish, it promises to be succulent with hot juice spurting out once you have a full bite into the dumplings.

Some of the other dishes are a let down though. The appetizer peanuts were cold, hard and tasted past its best. The Yang Zhou Fried Rice ($9.50) was also dry and lacked the fragrance and almost felt like I was eating stale rice.

The serving staff were very friendly and made us feel at home, and even offered to change our order of fried rice after we ‘complained’. Too late for us though.

This restaurant has potential, but is unfortunately chucked at a cold and sorry state of a corner behind an escalator at Centrepoint. The Eastern Restaurant has some hits and misses, with one excellent Zha Jiang Noodles.