Just think… a whole WORLD of NOODLES

While Andreas whooped it up at a stag birthday party in Hollywood last night, daughter Alekka and I amused ourselves with a movie and dinner out at one of her favorite spots in SoCal. If Noodle World had been here when we were living in LA with four kids we would have been regulars, no doubt about it. The menu is six pages of egg noodles, rice noodles, bean noodles; Thai noodles, Chinese noodles, Japanese noodles, Vietnamese noodles; noodle soups, soupless noodles, pan-fried noodles. Won ton! Soba! Udon! Pho! And as if that weren’t enough, the whole back page is Boba World, where you can select smoothies, teas, coffees, milkshakes, or coolers in flavors like kiwi, taro, lychee, and mango. For an extra 35 cents you can (and should) add boba: big chewy tapioca pearls that sink to the bottom, where they wait for you to suck them up through an extra-wide straw. You can also ask the server to put a big spoonful of taro pudding or lychee jelly in your drink if that’s what you want, or spray whipped cream on top. Boba (aka Bubble Tea) is big in LA and the Bay Area; I wonder if it will ever make its way to Medford.

After much deliberation, Alekka and I both selected Thai-inspired dishes from the “pan-fried” section. She had number 80, Pad See-Ew - wide rice noodles with Chinese broccoli, chicken, egg, and sauce. I chose number 83, Spicy Pan Fried - the same wide rice noodles but this time stir-fried with beef, carrots, red pepper, mushrooms, basil, bean sprouts, tomatoes, big slices of jalapeno, and a different sauce. Everything on the menu is in the 6 to 8 dollar range, and the family-style plates are huge. We also ordered egg rolls, a meaty Thai version with a thin crunchy skin, and ended up with plenty of food for at least four people – hurray for leftovers! My dish was very tasty, with chewy noodles, crisp vegetables, and a tangy-spicy sauce. I found Alekka’s a little bland (though it suited her just fine). If you want to spice things up, there is an intriguing array of condiments on each table including sriracha, sour pickled vegetable relish, hoisin sauce, and sliced jalapeno peppers.

My impression is that some menu items are more true to type than others. The owners of the place are Thai, so it might be assumed that those dishes have the strongest claim to authenticy. Our oldest son Dimitri, who is an informed consumer of Vietnamese pho, was impressed by Noodle World’s version on a trip here last year. But this is a pan-Asian place, and its strong point may not be that it’s just like you would get in Beijing or Bangkok. Rather, I’m recommending it because it is cheap, tasty, and fun. It’s also open until 1 am and is invariably busy.

The original Noodle World - now there are several in the area, and a couple of Noodle Planets as well - is located in the former Big Boy diner where Andreas worked when he was in high school. Used to be, back in the day, Alhambra was about as white a little town as you would find anywhere outside of Mayberry (except for all those Greeks, of course). Downtown was peppered with diners, burger joints, and lunch counters. Of those places, Rick’s hamburgers on Main, where Andreas’s oldest brother Steve (“Zorba”) and his cronies held court at a corner booth for decades, is one of the last survivors. Now the ethnic face of Alhambra has changed and Asian restaurants of all kinds abound, in many cases housed in new buildings that have replaced all the California Spanish-style ones that were so badly damaged in the 1971 and 1987 earthquakes. In the case of Noodle World, instead of gutting the old building, the original diner booths are incorporated into a bright colorful remodel, and the old Big Boy mascot remains as a figurehead sticking out of the wall at one end of the room. It’s a sort of ancient iconic idol, its former meaning only partly understood, like a statue on Easter Island.