Hi, my name is Simone Tong.
I'm the chef at Little Tong Noodle Shop.
This restaurant is dedicated to mixian noodles.
They're rice noodles that originated from Yunnan Province in the southwest part of China.
Yunnan borders Myanmar, Vietnam, and Laos, so there's a lot of Southeast Asian influence
also.
In New York, there are many different kinds of noodle shops.
We have soba, we have ramen, and we have pho, which is one of my favorites.
Pho is made of rice and so is mixian.
What makes this noodle different from pho—or other noodles—is the broth, and the ingredients
that we bring together with the mixian.
The texture has a little more of a spaghetti feel, but it's all made out of rice, so you
don't feel very full after eating it.
The ingredients are so seasonal, that as you eat each bowl you can sense the season change
and the love that's put into it.
The mixian noodles are made 100 percent out of rice and water.
They're slightly fermented, so they have a hint of sourness to them.
And because of the fermentation, when we cook them they're also a little springy.
It adds a good texture to the broth or sauce.
The "Grandma Mixian" is inspired by Lijiang, which is a very old town.
We make a very wholesome broth that takes about 24 to 36 hours to cook.
It consists of chicken bones, duck bones, and lots of different aromatics and spices.
As it slowly simmers and evaporates down, the broth gains more and more character.
So, broth is a living thing.
We confit chicken thighs in their own chicken fat, so it's very tender and juicy.
And then we also make our own house-fermented chili, with fresh long hots, a little Thai
chili, garlic, and ginger all mixed together.
We also make a black-garlic oil with black sesame and roasted garlic, so it has a very
aromatic feel.
It's very homey.
We have cilantro, different kinds of seasonal pickles, and then one of the most important
ingredients is the pu'er steeped-tea egg.
We steep the egg in tea, soy, and spice.
In Yunnan, they grow different kinds of edible flowers—they love flowers—so we added
some flowers and some perfume-y flavor to the whole thing.
So the flavor is pretty complex.
I grew up loving mixian.
I really understand and love the classic, traditional kind of mixian found in China.
But I come from an American fine-dining background, so I went to a different part of Yunnan and
tasted a different type of mixian.
I wanted to share the variety and the diversity of Chinese cuisine.
Chinese food is very-seasonally driven, because we were all farmers and peasants.
We would go to the market, we would buy ingredients, we would stir-fry them, and we wouldn't have
much left over.
So it's very fresh and ingredient-driven.
I want to do more as a chef in New York to share that part of Chinese cooking, and to
tell a newer story about Chinese cuisine.