At lunchtime, the dining room at Nandao Rice & Noodle buzzes with a mix of Chanel-clad women polishing off platters of Hainanese chicken rice, and groups of men sporting heavy construction boots slurping down giant bowls of beef noodle soup. The walls of the smallish, modest dining room are adorned solely with promotional photos of its own food. On the speakers overhead, a Taylor Swift album plays in its entirety, then starts up again.
This might be my favorite place in the entire San Gabriel Valley to have lunch right now.
Nandao Rice & Noodle, which opened in May at the corner of Garvey and Garfield avenues in Monterey Park, isn’t geographically specific, but more of a greatest hits compilation of foods currently dominating the SGV.
The menu advertises Singaporean cuisine, which incorporates influences from Chinese, Malay and Indian traditions and ingredients. Then there’s the Taiwanese-ish beef noodle soup, dumplings, truffle French fries, and a few other offerings that can only be described as Angeleno creations.
But the dish that anchors the restaurant is Hainan chicken rice.
Owner JoJo Wu, who also opened the high-end Southeast Asian restaurant Star Leaf in Pasadena, doesn’t eat chicken. But after trying the Hainanese chicken rice chef Wu Hai Feng made for a family meal at Star Leaf two years ago, she had a change of heart.
The experience sparked a quest for the dish all over the San Gabriel Valley, and eventually led to asking Feng to help open Nandao Rice & Noodle.
Before Star Leaf, Feng operated multiple chicken rice restaurants in Singapore. Though Hainanese poached chicken and rice originated in the Hainan province in southern China, it’s a celebrated cultural touchstone throughout Southeast Asia. It’s considered the national dish of Singapore, where you’ll find it served at countless hawker stalls, high-end restaurants and even school canteens.
While nowhere near as prevalent in Los Angeles, several chicken rice restaurants have sprouted up around town over the last decade, with Vietnamese, Cambodian and Thai styles represented alongside the more traditional Hainanese.
If you ask for my favorite of the moment, I’ll direct you to Nandao Rice & Noodle.
Each piece of chicken is sheathed in a strip of pale, slack, slippery skin. The meat is firm and plump with its own poaching liquid, fragrant with ginger and garlic. Equally important is the accompanying dome of rice, studded with bits of crispy fried onion. Each glossy grain is its own tiny, meaty flavor bomb.
Beside the rice, there’s a dish that holds a trio of signature Hainanese chicken rice condiments. The first is a chunky ginger and scallion oil, followed by dark soy sauce, and a red sauce sharp with chiles, ginger and vinegar. I prefer to interchange bites of chicken and rice with each sauce, savoring the punch of the ginger or sting of the chiles. Some people like to dump all three onto the plate. You do you.
Each order comes with a bowl of the poaching liquid containing a few leaves of cabbage so wilted, they fully melt into the soup. You can enjoy the broth between bites of chicken and rice as a sort of soothing palate reset button. Or eat it all together in heaping spoonfuls.
The soy braised chicken is equally satisfying and supple, with sweet and salty caramel skin stained with both light and dark soy sauce.
It is not common to find exemplary chicken rice and beef noodle soup at the same restaurant. In fact, it’s downright confounding. If someone slid into my DMs with such a claim, I’d call them a liar. But Nando Rice & Noodle is the exception.
The braised beef shank noodle soup is similar to Taiwanese hong shao — minus the spice of doubanjiang (fermented chile soybean paste) and with bits of stray fried onion that drift and soften in the broth. Simmered for more than 10 hours, it exudes a beefy complexity tinged with star anise and black cardamom, and a subtle, lingering sweetness. The bowl is crowded with thick rounds of braised beef, springy noodles and a few stalks of gai lan. I found it deeply restorative. Even as the temperatures reached the mid-90s, I kept slurping.
If the dining room is not overly crowded, you might spy Wu at a table in the corner, filling and folding the spicy wontons. The skins cling like wet T-shirts to the filling beneath, with each plump bundle nearly bursting with big, discernible chunks of shrimp and ground pork. They bob in a bowl filled with a combination of aged, Chinese black vinegar, light soy sauce and chile oil. There’s enough sauce to happily drown each wonton, and bring home leftovers to use throughout the rest of the week.
While the provenance of certain dishes may be obvious, others are simply Feng’s wild card creations. The chicken lime cold noodle was devised to repurpose one of the chef’s favorite condiments from his menu at Star Leaf. It’s an electric green paste of jalapeño, lime, mint and garlic, used to dress a bowl of cold soba noodles. The gray strands of buckwheat are covered in tiny irregularities that help the sauce adhere to the uneven surface. Nutty, dense and resilient, they’re slippery and cooling under a mountain of shredded chicken and diced cucumber.
The charcoal tofu is another Star Leaf crossover dish, with bricks of tofu encased in a crunchy, jet-black shell made from edible activated charcoal powder. The effect is more visual than anything, with a mild earthy aftertaste.
The “cucumbers in vinaigrette” are actually soy vinegar pickles, presented as a bowl of shriveled rounds of cucumber. Feng salts the cucumbers to draw out the moisture, leaving them wrinkled, ultra crunchy and bursting with the tangy vinegar brine.
You can order classic triangles of kaya toast filled with sweet coconut and pandan jam for dessert, but the bowls of Fuzhou bing fan and grass jellies swimming in coconut milk with popping boba proved wildly refreshing during these late summer months. But again, you do you.
The post Is this Monterey Park noodle shop serving L.A.’s best Hainan chicken rice? appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
