My Obsessive Quest for a Thrilling Beef Noodle Soup

As Lanzhou beef noodle soup goes from regional specialty to global attraction, I set out to find the best bowls in New York City.

A few months ago, I fell down a rabbit hole. Actually, it was a noodle hole.

It all started with an Instagram photo: a bowl of steaming beef broth as clear as a polished window, with a tight coil of noodles, a crimson puddle of chile oil, thin shingles of beef and radish, and cilantro leaves peeking through the broth. The whole thing was so cartoonishly pristine it seemed ripped from an anime series.

That image touched off an obsession in the way only an alluring picture of noodles you randomly scroll past on the internet can. I had never even tasted the dish — called Lanzhou lamian, or Lanzhou beef noodle soup — yet it had all the makings of my new favorite food.

I went into research-paper mode, and learned that this wasn’t just any regional dish. Several historians told me about Ma Baozi, a Hui Muslim from Lanzhou, a city in northwestern China, who in 1915 began selling a translucent beef soup with hand-pulled noodles; it proved a staple business for Hui Muslims, and later became hugely popular throughout the country as inexpensive, filling breakfast food. I watched mesmerizing videos of chefs pounding and stretching noodles by hand at a school in Lanzhou, where people travel from across the world to master the craft of noodle pulling. And then I ate 16 bowls of noodles.

Lanzhou is not exactly a tourist destination, and its beef noodles are not as widely known outside China as dishes like mapo tofu or dan dan noodles. But in recent decades, the dish has begun to go the way of pad Thai. Local government officials in China have promoted it — subsidizing Lanzhou noodle restaurants and touting the city’s noodle schools — to stimulate tourism and economic development, said Christopher St. Cavish, a food writer in Shanghai.

Lanzhou noodle restaurants have opened over the past decade or two in cities like London, Sydney and New York, where there are several new shops. The soup’s popularity grows even as Hui Muslims flee political oppression in China. Some have immigrated to Queens, finding refuge at shelters serving the dish.