If you’ve been following the food scene in Concord lately, you might be curious about Noodles & Pearls.
The ramen and bubble tea restaurant on Pleasant Street had a soft opening in mid-October, then after only a few days of business, it abruptly shut down. The sudden move left many people wondering whether the business had already folded.
But fear not, ramen fans, because the place is back up and running – they just performed renovations and spruced the place up while they were closed.
The walls, once bare and white, are now a calming shade of green, adorned with photos. The food counter, formerly plain black, now has outline-style designs of ramen bowls, noodles and bubble tea all over it. The place has a personality now.
But we stopped by last week for the food, not the personality.
We had been waiting for a place like this to open around here for quite some time – after all, who doesn’t love a good bowl of ramen? Though we planned to stop by during the initial soft opening period, we didn’t make it in until after the re-opening, but better late than never.
The menu is extraordinarily simple: for food you can get a bowl of ramen with pork, beef, chicken or tofu, or a pho sandwich. For beverages, there’s a cooler with traditional soft drinks and a few flavors of bubble tea, with options for what kinds of “pearls” you want in the tea – we’ll get to this part in a minute.
Being a big fan of beef, this Food Snob ordered a bowl of the beef ramen. I also got a cup of lychee bubble tea with boba pearls, which will be reviewed immediately after the ramen.
About five minutes after placing my order, an employee called out number 1, which matched the number on the token I was given after placing my order, letting me know it was my turn to get my food.
I found it somewhat difficult to walk from the counter back to my seat at the bar facing the street – the bowl was filled to the brim, so I had to walk slowly and carefully so as not to spill all over the tile floor. The bowl was not served on a tray, so I made extra sure I walked lightly – I didn’t want to spill any on myself, either.
Once I sat down, I was impressed with the way the ramen looked. The presentation was leaps and bounds ahead of what you get from a 29-cent pack of Maruchan ramen noodles. This bowl had stringy veggies leaping out of it, with big slices of beef and halves of a hard-boiled egg poking up from below the surface. I was pretty excited to dig in.
Once I did, I found a couple of things surprising. First, given that my only previous experience with ramen was the budget, microwavable kind, I was expecting the broth to be very salty and watery, but it wasn’t. The broth was mild in flavor but a bit gamey, and it also had an oily texture that I wasn’t prepared for. The noodles here were also thicker than I expected, and a bit chewier, too.
I opted to use chopsticks, though traditional Asian soup spoons as well as sporks were available – none are really perfect, though, since you have a lot of liquid and a lot of slippery, long solids that are all tricky to scoop up. Nonetheless, I made it work with the chopsticks.
For the most part.
The beef in my ramen was excellent – it was tender and juicy and tasted like it was slow-cooked. The pieces, though, were really big – almost the size of the palm of my hand. Though I’d normally sing the praises of larger pieces of meat, in this instance, using chopsticks, it was hard to deal with.
There were other people in the restaurant, so I didn’t really want to just pick up a patty-sized piece of beef with chopsticks, gnaw a corner off of it then plop it back into my bowl of soup. Instead, I found a piece of a manageable size, grabbed it with the sticks and popped the whole thing in. It was so good – if only the pieces were a little smaller, it would have been ideal.
The rest of the ingredients were pretty classic ramen staples: green onion, shredded carrots, bean sprouts and bamboo shoots. There was also a halved hard-boiled egg.
As I made my way through the bowl, I struggled to get bites that contained noodles, veggies and beef, so I ended up kind of picking these items one at a time. They were good, but I wished that I could have figured out a way to grab a big bite that had everything in it at once. Such is the challenge of eating soup with sticks, I suppose.
After several slurps of the ramen I needed a drink, so I went for the bubble tea.
If you’ve never had (or heard of) it before, bubble tea is a cold drink made up of tea (with the option to add milk) and tapioca balls, which are often referred to as bubbles or pearls.
I’d had bubble tea before, but not since I was a UNH student many moons ago, stopping by With Panache Café in the wee hours of the night. Suffice it to say, I didn’t remember much about those earlier bubble tea experiences.
I ordered lychee flavored tea without knowing what lychee was (it’s a fruit native to China that sort of looks like a smaller strawberry, with white fruit inside the red skin, I now know thanks to Google) and got the with-milk variety. I went for the standard boba bubbles – there were fruit flavors available, but not really knowing what the lychee tea would taste like, I decided to just stick with whatever the standard option was (not that I knew what boba was or tasted like, either).
The tea flavor was soft and accessible. It only faintly tasted like tea, with the dominant flavor being something close to sugar water with a splash of milk. It sounds weird, but it was a pleasant flavor to this Food Snob.
The pearls, though, were a very different experience. True, I hadn’t had any bubble tea in probably a decade and was by no means an expert in the field, but I just imagined the bubbles would be soft and that they’d pop in my mouth and then quickly melt.
That wasn’t the case.
The bubbles were solid, and thicker and chewier than I thought they’d be. I couldn’t pinpoint the taste of them. Bubble tea is typically served with a very wide straw so as to allow the bubbles to come up, but the straws here are virtually the exact same diameter as the bubbles. The result is like the scene in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory where Augustus Gloop gets stuck in the pipeline before the pressure launches him upward at an explosive rate.
Of course, this scenario can be avoided by just ditching the straw.
If you’re looking for a new experience, give this place a try. Hours are 3 to 7 p.m. Monday through Friday and 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Give them a call at 224-1000 for more info.
May 10, 2018
Hey Food Snob! My name is Angie and I currently work a noodles and pearls. Since your last visit we have made many changes for the better! I encourage you to come in again and give us another chance. Thanks so much 🙂