After reading Jonathan Gold’s Weekly Restaurant Recommendation for Lucky Noodle King in San Gabriel on the KCRW Good Food blog, I told Tony, Allan, and BeiBei (my San Gabriel Valley partners-in-crime) that we should definitely try it out. How could we not give this place a shot considering it has been featured in multiple publications and has an average rating of four stars on Yelp? We decided to make an afternoon excursion out of it – Lucky Noodle King followed by Source Code, a new movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Michelle Monaghan.
This place looks like your typical hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant in the San Gabriel Valley, and I don’t mean that as a bad thing. In fact, most of my favorite Chinese restaurants are holes-in-the-wall types. They tend to have the cheapest, tastiest, most-authentic foods. Unlike most hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurants, however, they actually have a website, complete with a menu featuring photos!
Hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurants also tend to have the best decorative items. Check out this Asian baby covered with oodles of noodles! This framed photo sits atop their register counter.
After perusing the menu for a bit, we decided on four dishes.
Wontons in Chili Oil Sauce (红油炒手)
Fagara Spicy Pot (麻辣烫)
Potstickers (鍋貼)
Sichuan Authentic Dan Dan Noodles (四川擔擔麵)
The dan dan noodles are by far their most popular item, according to several articles and the reviews on Yelp. Personally, my favorite of the four dishes was the wontons in chili oil sauce. I felt this dish had just the right spiciness level and the wontons were a good texture. I was not too keen on the dan dan noodles, although I’m just not a huge fan of savory foods with peanut-based sauces. Everything we ordered was spicy, except for the potstickers. Apparently, for BeiBei, these dishes weren’t even spicy enough!
This place has excellent service, with an extremely friendly waitress. She helped recommend dishes for us and even offered to make the dishes more spicy for BeiBei. I can’t say I would have cravings for these foods myself, but I definitely think this restaurant is worth a try. There’s no doubt you get bang for your buck here – excellent prices. If you enjoy Sichuan foods or spicy foods in general, this is definitely the place for you.
Give Lucky Noodle King a visit at 534 E. Valley Blvd., San Gabriel, CA 91776. Say you heard of the restaurant via a blog! The waitress was happy to hear it when we had told her that’s how we heard of this restaurant.
Following our lunch adventure, we headed over to the Santa Anita Mall to watch Source Code. After discovering that this movie has a 90% rating on Rotten Tomatoes (Yes, it does seem like we’re all about ratings when it comes to everything we do, doesn’t it?), we bumped this up our movie list and decided to postpone our home viewing of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I. This movie was just the right length, at one hour and thirty-four minutes. The four of us concurred that we didn’t think it deserved that high of a rating, although it was pretty entertaining. I felt like it was trying to mimic Inception with its “complexity” and general theme/idea. Considering how popular Inception became and how much people were intrigued by the concept portrayed in the film, it is no surprise that other movies would attempt to go down that route in order to gain public approval. Personally, I would probably have given this movie about a 75-80% rating. I would recommend to watch it and let me know what you think!
