Frank's noodle house

Our friend Louisa recommended Frank's before moving away from Portland. I clearly remember how she described the place: awesome noodles, no ambiance. Continuing on my craving for carbs-loaded comfort food, we made our way to Frank's on a Friday evening.

The store front is uniquely Portland. It's a residential house off Broadway street. Not much outside the house suggests that it's a business, until you look for it. I say that it looks uniquely Portland because I don't remember seeing this much else where. Portland is known as a city where it's easy for people to start a small business. The culture is that more often than not, people would do it with the minimum start-up cost. So instead of paying to build up a commercial space, people often operate in an existing residential space. Looks like Frank decided to buy/rent this house in which to run his hand-made noodle business.

The feel inside the restaurant is even more homey. It's like being invited to someone's home for dinner. It's quite clean for a Chinese restaurant. =) Frank apparently loves his floor and goes to a great length protecting it.

As savvy diners, we consulted yelp and other restaurant review sites for what's good and what's not, and have learned that we should stick to what the name of the restaurant says. People come here for their hand-made noodles. Everything else they offer seems mediocre. Though their hand-made dumplings is supposedly another must-try. So we took the advice to heart and ordered two noodle dishes and a dumpling appetizer.

The dumplings are good, almost reminds of the ones they have in China. Somehow good dumplings are hard to find in the US. The noodles looked awesome, coated with thick sauce. The squid noodle was very well seasoned and a bit spicy for me. There are bits of squid tentacles here and there. Though I wish there was more. The handmade noodles are tougher than we expected. The flavor seemed to stay on the surface of the noodles, but not absorbed inside. The other noodle dish was noodle with black bean sauce, which is Jose's all time favorite noodle dish. Frank's rendition lacks the strong fermented black bean flavor. The sauce was thick, but there's no visible black beans in it. It was good, as we polished both dishes, but no where near as good as it could be.

hand-made noodles with squid, medium spicy

noodles with black bean sauce

On our way home, Jose said he wouldn't return to Franks. We both agreed that the dumplings were really nice. But we could make dumplings at home that are somewhat comparable. So I made a mental note to get supplies over the weekend for home made dumplings. See the next post.