Crossing The Bridge Noodle Soup

I'm in Brooklyn's Chinatown. This is 8th Avenue. Here, take a look. This is 8th Avenue. Brooklyn right now has some restaurants that you can't find even in Manhattan where Queens. And today we're gonna go try one of them. We're gonna go try Yunnan cuisine. Yunnan is in Southern China. If you match the map of the U.S. and China, like Yunnan would be where Texas is. And long time ago, Yunnan used to be known as Dali, which is like a whole different empire. If you ever watched the TV series Tianlong Babu or Demigods and Semi-demons, you know what I'm talking about. That's where they have the martial arts where they like point their finger at you and you die. So anyway, Dali was taken over by the Mongols and then it became part of China. And today we're gonna go try their most famous dish, the crossing the bridge rice noodle soup. So Guoqiao Mixian, crossing the bridge rice noodle soup. That sounds really kind of weird, right? Well, there's a story behind that like there is for almost all Chinese things. The story was back in the day, there was a scholar and he was trying to study to take the imperial exam to become an official. To help him concentrate, he would study on this little island and the only access was a bridge. So every day his wife would bring him food and she would often bring him noodle soup. But by the time she gets to him from her home with the noodles in the soup, the noodles were soggy and the soup was cold. So she came up with an idea. She separated the noodles into a separate container and also she covered the top of the soup with a layer of oil. This way, the heat of the soup was trapped by the oil and the noodles were not soggy. Then when she gets to her husband, she would mix all the ingredients together and the noodle soup was delicious. And that's how Guoqiao Mixian or crossing the bridge rice noodle soup came along. That is the legend anyway. So as you can see here, the ingredients were brought out to me separately. So we have here some green onions, tofu skin, I love those, cilantro and a little egg. Here we have lamb and beef. Here's the broth and here's the noodles. So this is kind of like a Chinese pho. And he's going to mix it all together for me. In goes the egg, the lamb and beef goes in. See how that cooked almost instantly. The broth is really really hot. They actually had to bring out the broth in special gloves because that's how hot this pho is. Tofu skin which cooks really quick. I like that. I love cilantro, I love green onions. That's a nice quantity of both. Finally the rice noodle goes in. You know what's funny about that story about the scholar who went to study for the imperial exam and his wife had to bring him the noodle soup? Only Asians will go to an exclusive isolated island to study. Now you know what's missing from this right? That's right, hot oil. All right, let's go ahead and dump this stuff in. Two, three, the spoon is so small. I need like a spoon three times this size. This spoon is for like normal people, it's not for like hot oil fanatics like me. Yeah, we gotta dump this in. Yep, a couple more. That looks about right. And also we gotta dump some vinegar in. I love my noodle soups with hot oil and vinegar. So we give that a good mix and get a spoon and let's taste this. Wow, this thing is like filled with hot oil which makes it awesome. This soup is so flavorful. This is amazing broth. This is amazing broth. You might not want to do what I did which is like basically make this into molten lava. This is so good with some vinegar and hot oil. The rice noodles are a little bit spongy and these rice noodles they typically don't soak in as much of the soup as regular noodles. If you eat it with this broth, it's absolutely amazing. I love cilantro and green onions in my soup. I think it gives it such great flavor and this soup is really amazing especially when it's cold outside. When it's cold outside, it's the winter, you get a nice steaming pot of noodle soup here, pour on some hot oil. That's good eating. I can't find my egg. Maybe like it. Oh here it is. Remember that little egg I had right here? Here you go. It's still a little gooey inside. Wow, I like that. All the flavor goes so well in this soup. You guys gotta try this. You gotta try this. This is so good. Now I can't go to a place and only get like one dish, right? So I gotta try some other specialties. This is the second dish I got. This is one of my favorite dishes and a lot of times the dishes in Yunnan are going to be similar to dishes in Sichuan. Sichuan is right above Yunnan. So this is sour soup with dumplings. Let's try this. Let's try the sour soup first. Oh that's really sour. I like that. I like my soups really sour and spicy. So right away, I get a burst of cilantro. I like the broth. It's very savory. Let's try it with the dumpling. This is so good. This is so good. The dumpling is very meaty. The skin is very very thin which I like. I hate thick skin dumplings. I like dumplings that are shy. I ordered one more dish. This is when like I start getting looks by the staff in the restaurant. They're like how many people do you have? I'm like one. How do you eat all that? I don't know. I just eat it. It's what I do. It's what I do for you guys. It's the sacrifices I make by eating a lot of food. This is the final dish I got because the waiter said I really really needed to try this. This is the Guoqiao Mixian but it's the dry version. It's not the soupy one you see here. So right away, I see pork. I see roasted peanuts. I see cilantro. If I dig in, I see hot oil. There should be sauce on the bottom. So let's mix this up. Oh look at that. This Mixian, this rice noodles is also cold. So you see the sauce on the bottom right there? This actually is starting to smell really really really good. All right there you go. There's my cold rice noodles. Cold Mixian. Let's try this. Wow. Wow. The noodles here are spongier because there's no soup here to make it even a little bit soggy. The sauce is soy sauce based but it also has something sweet in there. I think there's some sugar in the sauce. It's spicy. It's sweet. It's sour. It's perfect. And then you got the crunch of the little peanuts. This dish, I could eat two bowls of this dish. This is amazingly satisfying. So again, here are the three dishes that I ordered. I loved them all. Who says you can only love one dish? If you ask me which one's the best, I can't even choose. I am now going to eat these strategically. I think I'm going to start with the dumplings first because I'm going to treat it like one of those hot oil dumpling appetizers. Then I'm going to hit the noodles and treat it kind of like a dun dun cold noodle. I'm going to finish off with the hot soup right before I head outside into the cold. That sounds like an awesome food strategy. I'm in the middle of my noodle soup right now. I took down the dumplings already. This thing, I added so much spice in here. I'm burning up. My lips are burning. I still feel good. I mean, I enjoy that sensation. I feel like I can go to the Arctic without a shirt right now. This is so spicy, but it's so good. So I'm going to keep battling this. I'm basically done with the noodle soup. My eyes are watering. I'm crying tears of spice. I felt like I just worked out for like three hours straight, but I feel so warm and nice. It has been done. I took down those three dishes. I feel sort of okay, sort of not, but I do feel a little nostalgic because I remember eating this in China and I would eat it and they would have these little food stands out in the street. So it's out in the open. Like you'll eat these in the winter. You just sit there and eat these and the snow's blowing. It's cold, but you don't feel it because you're taking down the soup and it's so warm. It's so spicy. I'm happy and I'm sad right now. I'm happy that I have found a place like this that exists in New York City. I'm sad that it's in Brooklyn. That's like really far. Also, Brooklyn has the best cupcakes. I'll take you guys sometime. All right, I'm going to go walk Thanks so much for watching guys. See you later.