Nan Zhou Hand Drawn Noodle House was the second place we hit after the No Kings march in Philadelphia. My friend used to eat here a lot but had not been back in years and so was excited to introduce me to the place. He, like all of the articles about Nan Zhou I have seen online, raved about the soups with hand drawn noodles. Unfortunately we were both disappointed by the noodles. Either the chef has so mastered the craft of pulling noodles that every noodle is exactly the same, with a perfectly round cross section, of the exact same diameter, or the noodles we were served were not hand pulled. I walked around the restaurant and all the customers I saw were eating the same noodles we were.

The Dumplings: Nan Zhou Hand Drawn Noodle House offers a lot of dumplings options, the fried or steamed coconut chicken curry dumplings sounded interesting, but I do not eat chicken. After eating a couple of plates of meat dumplings at Luscious Dumpling, I opted for the pan-fried vegetable dumplings. Often vegetable dumplings have artificial looking bright green wrappers, but these dumplings had a light pale green wrapper. It was so jarring not to see the bright green wrapper that my friend asked me if I thought there was something wrong with the dumplings. I suspect Nan Zhou Hand Drawn Noodle House just uses natural food based dyes rather than artificial dyes to color the dough. The dumplings were filled with small pieces of firm tofu, that looked like pressed 5-spice tofu, mushrooms and some greens and were good, but not great. They had a mild, savory vegetable flavor that is hard to tie to any particular vegetable. They were well pan-fried, so the wrappers were crispy, which to my mind always improves things.

The Location: Nan Zhou Hand Drawn Noodle House is in Philly’s Chinatown on Race street between 10th and 11th.