Three Different Bowls of Taiwanese Beef Noodle

The local team wanted to take us out to dinner and karaoke tonight. But we ended up going straight to an outlet of PARTYWORLD, which confused me. I thought that we were going to dinner first? It turned out that the idea was to get beef noodle *at* the karaoke place, as it was apparently very famous for it (and the taxi driver vouched for it too). I was still totally baffled by it though, as it tasted terrible. It basically tasted like you'd imagine beef noodle would taste like at a karaoke place: not good.



Afterwards, the thought of some more beef noodle came to mind, particularly the 24 hour shops on Xining South Road that my Uber driver had mentioned to me earlier in the week. I went first to Jianhong Beef Noodles (7 Xining South Road), which featured several buckets of pickled veggies, chili sauce, a shacha-like sauce, and something that looked like little globular fish eggs but melted into spicy chili oil instead. Either way, this was delicious and light years ahead of the previous bowl.



Actually, I intentionally got a small bowl earlier, precisely to save enough stomach space to try Wangfu Beef Noodles around the corner too (69 Luoyang Street, 2371-2388). They had the same four buckets of condiments on each table, but here they gave you a choice of thickly cut noodles, which were nice and chewy. Still, one thing missing here was the raw garlic cloves that they had on each table at Jianhong. In that sense, I guess I liked both shops.