The Sichuanese noodle I’ve been chasing since “Cheers” went off the air is back at last where it belongs — 42 East Broadway, site of the original Hwa Yuan, which opened in 1968 and pioneered the craze for fiery Sichuanese in a city that then knew “Chinese” mostly as starchy, Americanized Cantonese.
The restaurant, beloved by Chinese food lovers, including David Letterman, Woody Allen and Steve McQueen, closed in late 1992.
Now, it’s been spectacularly reborn — with chef Chen Lieh Tang’s spicy cold sesame noodles on the menu. The master, who’s 65, is back in the kitchen at this unrecognizably larger and more opulent version.
The seminal dish — invented by Chen Lieh’s late father, the legendary “Shorty” Tang — helped catalyze the great regional-Chinese boom that also introduced New Yorkers to Hunanese, Fujian and Shanghai-style cooking.
Shorty Tang was born in Sichuan province and fled to Taiwan in 1949 after the Communists took over mainland. He came to New York in 1955 and, with the help of a “garmento,” his grandson James Tang says, launched Hwa Yuan in a former textile factory.
Although Shorty moved to the US when Chen Lieh was 13, he wasn’t able to leave Taiwan until he was 21. He plunged into his father’s business at Hwa Yuan, “doing every job,” he told us. Shorty passed away at age 50 in 1974, and Chen Lieh took over until it closed.
The Tang family owned the building and leased it to a Bank of China branch. Chen Lieh retired from restaurants. When the lease was up a few years ago, the family wasn’t sure what to do with it.
“The building was a complete money pit,” says James, a son of Chen Lieh who is an investment banker, as well as a partner in the new Hwa Yuan. “At first, we thought we’d put in another bank, the easiest kind of tenant.”
But then, James recalls, “Wellington Chen, the head of the Chinatown business improvement district, suggested to my father that he reopen the restaurant. He said Chinatown needed new restaurants” — which it did. There are fewer eateries of any kind than in the past, and many new ones serve Japanese, Vietnamese or Thai food.
Chen Lieh was quick to take Chen’s advice.
“My dad knew so much of Manhattan’s Chinese food was crap,” says James — undercut by immigration laws that made it almost impossible for chefs from China to move here, among other factors.
“We knew it would be a lot of work, but we decided to do it 2¹/₂ years ago,” James adds. “It was a long demolition. We had to remove vaults.”
They spent “millions” to create a three-level, 21st-century Hwa Yuan. The result is exotic without being cliched or garish. A dramatically glowing wall behind the ground-floor onyx bar is made of orange Spanish marble that was shipped to China for cutting into thin, translucent segments. Screens separating the upstairs dining rooms are of hand-carved Chinese mahogany.
A giant, conical tank — Chen Lieh calls it “the bullet” — rotates ducks for a Beijing-style preparation, one of the menu’s non-Sichuanese dishes, along with “Chinese” Caesar salad. There’s also a steakhouselike raw bar for shrimp and lobster cocktail, but my favorite dish was Grand Marnier prawns, intoxicating in every way, without a trace of the classic’s too-common thick flour-and-mayo coating.
Boys, welcome back to the block — and the wok!
Recipe for success
Before Japanese ramen or Shanghai-style wheat noodles conquered New York palates, Hwa Yuan’s cold, round egg noodles ruled the Chinatown night.
“Shorty” Tang dressed them with a mysterious blend of soy sauce, peanut butter, rice wine, black vinegar, chili, scallions and sesame oil. It yielded a supernova of mingling, tingling flavors and tactile gratification. The velvety noodles conveyed notes sweet, spicy and tart.
Tang’s recipe spread to other eateries he owned and to scores of imitators. Over time, “cold spicy sesame noodles” declined into a feeble, peanut-buttery burlesque of the real thing.
The version his son, Chen Lieh Tang, serves at the new Hwa Yuan hews almost precisely to the original, although the key, grandson James Tang says, is “a very specific ratio” of elements that is a “secret formula.”
The handmade noodles are boiled and chilled. The sauce is made from all the components stirred in “a big vat.”
It lacked only one thing to my taste: not enough chili. “It’s scaled back a little to make it more palatable to more people,” James acknowledged. “But we’ll ask people what their preference is.”
They don’t have to ask me.
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