Gourmet Noodle Bowl - International District

Many times, my go to places for food are not necessarily ones that I find reading food blogs or searching through Yelp, but are suggested to me by word of mouth. A good friend of mine, Quynh, got lost in the ID one day and just randomly stumbled on Gourmet Noodle Bowl. She loved the Taiwanese food there so much that she kept telling me about it and eventually I went there with her. She said to get the braised beef noodle soup and I obliged and tossed aside my aversion for eating meat for one day. Man, was I thankful that she brought me here, because the soup was awesome!

In continuing with the tradition of word of mouth recommendations, I kept telling Tom about Gourmet Noodle Bowl and we met up at the ID to taste the wonders of braised beef noodle soup.

Finding Gourmet Noodle Bowl is a little tricky; it’s in between Lane and Dearborn on 8th. Tom said that a more helpful description would have been to say it’s next door to the Crawfish King, so there you go for a useful landmark, assuming one knows where Crawfish King is.

When we started to order the food, the waitress was very friendly and helpful, suggesting various dishes for us to try along with the soup. Since I had never ordered anything beyond the soup here, I was curious to see how the rest of the food on the menu tasted. We ordered the braised beef noodle soup, some kind of greens (which I unfortunately was not able to recognize and which the waitress only described as similar to bok choy), chicken dumplings and duck.

The braised beef noodle soup was a little difficult to transfer from the one big bowl into our individual smaller bowls and I ended up splashing Tom with soup and speckling his shirt with broth. Eventually, the noodles and broth made it into their respective bowls and I thought the soup was a little lacking in salt and the distinctive savoriness that I had remembered from prior visits, but the house-made noodles were a nice al dente texture. On the other hand, Tom would have preferred the noodles to be cooked more.

Braised beef noodle soup

The greens were pretty forgettable - drenched in oil, soggy and just plain not good. The duck, which apparently is a very popular dish, included the bone and was extremely tough and chewy. I honestly could not figure out how to eat the duck – first I tried biting off a piece, but it was impossible, then I tried using my chopstick and finger to tear off something, then two chopsticks – the darn thing refused to come apart! I had a “Pretty Woman” moment during my failed attempts to pull something off where Julia Roberts was trying to figure out how to eat the escargot and it ended up flying onto another table. Not wanting to experience that movie moment in real life, I gave up and declared the duck inedible.

Greens (right) and duck (left)

When the dumplings arrived, we were instructed to eat them as soon as they were placed on the table. The skin had a nice smooth, soft texture and the filling contained of a wonderful ginger chicken. We both agreed that the chicken dumplings were delicious and worth getting again.

Chicken dumplings

Overall, the dishes are hit and miss at Gourmet Noodle Bowl. We noticed that almost everyone else in the restaurant had ordered the hot pot, so we’ll most likely return sometime to try it out.

Gourmet Noodle Bowl
707 8th Avenue S (between Lane and Dearborn)
Seattle, Washington 98104
(206) 264-8899