HuaJia Rice Noodle
HuaJia Rice Noodle is a Chinese restaurant specializing in a rare dish: rice noodles served with clams.
This low-key shop offers a menu of seven steaming bowls of noodle soups filled with these flavourful ocean-dwellers, served in HuaJia's signature pork bone broth.
There's few things better than a piping hot portion of clams in soup heated up to almost 150 C, especially when its cold out.
The best part, however, is the unlimited rice noodles that come with every bowl.
Stone bowls filled with the original flavoured clam rice noodle soup ($12.99) also come with tomato slices, wood ear fungus and luncheon meat.
To heat things up a notch or two (or ten) is the spicy version for $12.99. Chili oil, sichuan peppercorns and dried tien tsin peppers add a deliciously numbing flavour to the broth.
Clams are accompanied by quail eggs, luncheon meat, fungus, and tomatoes. If you want, you can add ingredients like shrimp, mussels, lamb, or more clams—always more clams—for a little extra.
And if you just can't get enough of these little smiling mollusks, you can get an order of them, stir fried for $6.
HuaJia also has a handful of dry Chongqing-style bowls that don't arrive with a smattering of clams.
The order of tomato soup ($12.99) comes with noodle options of rice noodles, vermicelli, or ramen. There's bok choy, boiled egg and lots of coriander.
A side of cold spiced marinated beef ($6.99) will help offset the spices in any hot soup noodle dish.
Otherwise, there's a variety of huge and refreshing drinks to cool you down, like the blue lemon yakult juice ($5.99) or grapefruit green tea ($5.99).
Hungry clam-lovers should head here for their favourite seafood soaked in different flavours and bottomless noodles.
Herman Wong