Noodle Quest, Shanxi. Part 3: The Noodle Boss and Noodle School

Photos and video: Graeme Kennedy.

The Noodle Boss had just changed the style of the restaurant in his Beijing hotel for the third time. Cantonese and Huaiyang hadn’t worked so he went back to his roots, opening a Shanxi noodle restaurant that would put on a show. It was the 1990s and, he told me last month, no one else was doing noodle entertainment. He had gotten the idea after a Japanese researcher had shown him old videos of noodle demonstrations. So that’s what he would do.

There was just one problem. No one knew how to do the tricks anymore. For the guy who blew up dough into a giant bubble, to demonstrate the elasticity of gluten, it was a challenge but not dangerous.

For the one coaxing thousands of strands out of flour and water, as fine as silk, too thin to actually cook and eat, it required precision and a sensitive touch.

But for the guy who sliced noodles off of dough placed on top of his head with sharp blades, it was all of that and more. He was right-handed, the Noodle Boss said, and he hadn’t been practicing in a mirror for months to become ambidextrous, as the hotel restaurant would later require.

One night, in the dining room, as he went to shave a noodle off his left side, his lack of coordination took a gruesome toll: he accidentally sliced his left ear off.

The Noodle Boss, Qu Qixiao (屈启晓)

About an hour after the Noodle Boss told the story, which may or may not be true, we were in the marquee restaurant in his marquee hotel in Taiyuan. We had just watched an hour’s worth of videos while sitting in one of those huge diplomatic-style Chinese rooms, part of his sprawling office suite hidden on the fifth floor. Mostly they showed the Noodle Boss in his later years, after he had made his fortune in the hotel business, and had become a benefactor of Shanxi’s noodle industry.

A few years ago, he founded an annual noodle festival, investing more than two million RMB of his own money for the logistics, including a giant custom-made cauldron where a hundred noodle-shavers could slice knife-cut noodles into steaming water at the same time. He knew every noodle businessman in the province that mattered, and was behind a number of development projects: in Noodle Town, a tourist development in a rebuilt ancient city 100km away, shop owners hung pictures of themselves with the Noodle Boss; at Noodle School his name secured us a meeting with the founders and a demonstration the following day.

We were about to get our own demonstration in the restaurant’s private room. As the cold dishes flooded the table, a young guy on a unicycle with two bars of dough on his head pulled up to a banquet table. A hostess stood off to the side, narrating as he began to rock back and forth on the unicycle, building up momentum. He jumped on and quickly began slicing, the noodles flying off of his head onto the table like magic, as he steadied himself on the single wheel. Clearly, this guy had practiced. After a full minute of slicing and rocking, he dismounted. I checked; he still had both ears.

Another guy came in to blow up a dough bubble, and another to pull the dragon’s beard noodles into such fine and dry strands that when he was done, the hostess picked up a lighter and lit several of the filaments, fire climbing up them like a wick.

Afterwards, we retired to the Noodle Boss’s office suite, where he showed off his calligraphy skills and his massive, four-meter wide desk, writing noodle-themed calligraphy for me to take back to Shanghai.

The next day was Noodle School in Taiyuan, and while most of the students were off for summer vacation, a handful remained for the demonstration, along with two certified noodle masters, Lu Feng (芦峰, 25 years of noodle experience) and Xu Genyuan (徐根源, 30 years of noodles).

Noodle School is part of a larger vocational school named the Shanxi Shengshi Tourism and Catering Technical School (山西盛世餐饮旅游技工学校) that teaches kids employable skills like computer programming, but also fun ones, like Western pastry and cakes, coffee, and Shanxi noodles. They turn out 40-50 Noodle Graduates every year, under the direction of Principal Liu (刘志娟), who founded the school in the early 2000s.

Principal Liu, a petite but powerful woman, marched us back into the cafeteria’s kitchen, buzzing with activity and preparation for our demonstration (and also, just for lunch). In a small room off to the side, Master Lu was getting ready with our first noodle, which was not quite a traditional noodle, but noodle-ish in appearance: flat strips of grated potato that had been tossed in wheat flour, steamed, cooled and then stir-fried with aromatics.

Potato "noodles"

I admired the flexibility in their understanding of noodles, but was relieved when things became more recognizable: three-color cat’s ears made with a dough of pumpkin, spinach and flour; “dimples” made by pressing the end of a chopstick in a tiny ball of dough, the kind of noodle that rewards obsessive-compulsive disorder; scissor noodles; “big knife” noodles, whose point of difference is that they are… cut with a big-ass knife; the single-strand longlife noodle; tijian’r, flicked from a plate into boiling water with a chopstick; baopi mian, in which a filling of “low” sorghum dough is pressed between two sheets of more “refined” flour dough, rolled into a single sheet and then cut by hand; and dragon’s beard noodles, which Master Xu turned into a crispy cake by brushing the noodles heavily with oil, wrapping them into bundles and baking; the result was somewhere between a noodle and a bing, and like nothing I’ve ever seen before. There were no unicycles involved.

"Minnows"

Rolling the three doughs together for cat's ears

Making three-color cat's ears on a sushi mat

Scissor noodles

Scissor noodles

"Big knife" noodles

Preparing the dough for dragon's beard noodles

Dragon's beard noodles

Longlife noodles

Longlife noodles

Baopi mian

????????Flicked noodles (tijian'r)

Pulled noodle "crisps" (拉面酥), ready for baking

Three-color cat's ears (left); scissor noodles (top); "dimples" made with a pumpkin dough (right)

Towards the end of it, even I lost a little interest, as the masters went through technique after technique at a rapid pace, but it was clear that the students had been preparing for our visit for hours. They cycled in from the prep kitchen to the demo room and showed off what they had practiced. We watched and snapped photos and thanked them.

Master Lu Feng (left) and Master Xu Genyuan (right)

More than the noodle techniques, it was the group of young kids that impressed the most. While their classmates were off studying computer programming or hair and makeup techniques, they were here in the kitchen, absorbing noodle culture and heritage. Even though 90% of them would go on to other majors, a few dozen would stick with it, according to the school.

Shanxi is no danger of losing its noodle heritage. Most people I met told me how common it is for people to make noodles at home, and several told me that’s why, paradoxically, it’s not as easy to find a wide variety of noodles in Taiyuan’s restaurants — anyone can make cat’s ears at home; they don’t need to go to a restaurant to eat them. A few, like the extruded noodles made from buckwheat flour (he lao), require tools regular people don’t keep at home. Most don't.

So this isn’t a story of disappearing noodle foodways or a melancholy look at a dying art. Noodles are doing just fine in Shanxi, thanks. What struck me most about the kids, some still in their teens, was that I was looking at the Noodle Nerds of the future, potential masters of my kind of art. They were kindred spirits with floury hands. I just hope they keep their ears.?

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