Bowltiful is dedicated to serving up the Lanzhou noodles that founder Charlie Zhang remembers so fondly from his childhood. A window into the kitchen provides a full view of the chefs (also known as noodle masters) as they painstakingly hand-pull all the noodles and prepare everything fresh daily.
Most of the menu at Bowltiful doesn’t involve soy sauce, instead calling on fresh and light seasoning. The dough for the noodles is made from scratch and kneaded into 300-gram cylindrical pieces, before the pulling process begins. Choose between nine different noodle widths, starting with super thin at 0.5-millimetre and moving right through to 30-millimetre.
Almost every dish is entirely customisable – from the type of noodle to the type of meat added – or you can order one of the bowls on the menu. The Lanzhou beef noodle soup, a Chinese-Muslim dish, is the most popular, followed closely by the braised lamb flap (or lamb belly) noodle soup and the hot chilli oil dry noodles. Most of the menu items are Zhang’s family recipes, passed down through generations.
Then there are the sides – you might choose from spicy beef salad and braised beef tripe, shredded tofu salad and seaweed salad. The chilli oil, which you’re encouraged to add to almost every dish, is also available to purchase.
The CBD outpost has plenty of tables for both solo and group dining and it’s open till late every night. It closes for just one day each year, on Lunar New Year.
