The rise of Sichuan food in New York has made the past decade or two a glorious era for prowlers of Chinese restaurants. Chongqing chicken and mung-bean jelly proliferated as skilled chefs flocked to the city. But while the miles of dan dan noodles and mountains of Sichuan peppercorns have been exhilarating, they have tended to overshadow the cuisine of another great chile-haunted region, Hunan.
Part of the problem is nomenclature. The word Hunan on a restaurant’s front window tends to say as much about the actual cooking inside as pandas and bamboo on the sign. At first glance it can be hard to distinguish Hunan Garden, say, from Hunan House until you see the menus and learn that the former name signifies egg rolls while the latter promises the red-braised pork that Mao used to dote on. Fake Hunans outnumber real ones, which is one reason to celebrate the appearance of Hunan Slurp. Operating in the East Village since May, Hunan Slurp lives up to both halves of its name.
When people in Hunan get hungry for a bowl of noodles, what they have in mind are mifen: long, white strands made from pounded rice, so smooth they may slither right out of the chopsticks of inexperienced slurpers. Chances for New Yorkers to practice their antiskid chopstick techniques have been limited, generally speaking, to the rice noodles of other parts of Asia. When you could find Hunanese noodles around town, they tended to be tucked away on larger menus with so many other Hunanese opportunities that they were rarely given a chance to slither.
Hunan Slurp offers some of those opportunities, too. The chef and proprietor, Chao Wang, comes from Hunan’s second-largest city, Hengyang, and fills the menu with both traditional Hunanese dishes and his own innovations. But noodles are the heart of the restaurant.
The restaurant has a stylish interior, handsome Chinese ceramics and a fresh take on Hunanese food.CreditJeenah Moon for The New York Times
They peek out from underneath slices of beef, tofu and barbecued pork, all fanned out like a hand of poker, in a soup-less wonder called Hometown Lu Fen. The sauce is in the bottom of the bowl, and should absolutely be augmented with some of the chopped pickled red chiles in oil served in a small dish on the side. In the string bean mifen, the noodles weave around a fried egg and a scattering of ground Berkshire pork, stir-fried to a crackle with little rounds of sliced, pickled green beans. There is no slick of chile oil on top, and the pale broth looks harmless enough, but once the soup is stirred together it will take the crease out of a pair of newly pressed trousers.
A little red sheaf of dried chile threads bobbing in the wild pepper and beef soup gives you an idea what you are in for, if the name hasn’t already given away the game. But with Hunan Slurp’s noodles, as with Hunanese food generally, heat is part of the message; it’s never the medium.
Stock is to the cook what pitch is to the opera singer, goes a Chinese proverb. Hunan Slurp’s soup stocks are rounded and cloudy from long-boiled bones and meat, and they tend to get better the longer they linger with their toppings. (So do the noodles.)
A master class in the art of broth subtlety is provided by the two-part soup that goes by the under-promising name fish fillet mifen. Part One is an oversize ceramic bowl of milky white pork-and-fish stock strewn with flower petals, pea shoots, purple basil and other fresh herbs. It arrives on a wooden tray next to Part Two, the noodles, which get their own bowl. The broth’s flavor was elusive at first, more a texture than a taste. Within minutes the steamed fish in the broth, together with the herbs, had transformed it into something splendid.
Like many of the new Chinese restaurants that have sprouted in the East Village, Hunan Slurp pays attention to appearances. Under a backlighted logo that spells out SLURP in elongated, noodly letters, a sheet of glass on First Avenue frames the long, tunneled dining room, designed by New Practice Studio. The interior is sheathed in wooden slats that run up one wall, arch their way across the ceiling and fall down the opposite wall. Depending on your frame of mind, eating at Hunan Slurp can feel like sitting under a rack of drying noodles or finding yourself inside the belly of a particularly tidy whale.
Noodles and stir-fries are prepared in the glassed-in kitchen inside Hunan Slurp.CreditJeenah Moon for The New York Times
A glassed-in kitchen lies in the back, its shelves stacked with colorfully glazed modern Chinese plates and bowls that you won’t find in the restaurant-supply shops on the Bowery. Once you leave the noodle section of the menu behind, it is possible to find cooking that doesn’t necessarily live up to the standard set by the crockery. I’m told that the bands of cumin-seasoned beef speared with toothpicks can be crisp and well-browned, but the ones I got were gray and floppy. And the sweet-and-sour spareribs, an appetizer, were far more sweet than sour, and tough, too.
On the best available evidence, Mr. Wang’s palate skews a bit sweet. This is unusual in a Hunanese kitchen, but only those spareribs were off-puttingly sugary. A multicolored salad of chilled cherry tomatoes was bright and refreshing despite a fruity marination in plum juice. (A similar dish sometimes turns up at Hao Noodle and Tea by Madam Zhu’s Kitchen, where it is sweeter, and still very enjoyable.) And the hint of sugar in stir-fried chicken did not soften the toothy bite of young ginger, or hide the ginger’s natural sweetness, either.
You may not notice the bias toward sweetness anyway, given the kitchen’s open embrace of chiles. An electrical current of heat crackles through the dim-sum-style chicken feet, cooked until they are falling-off-the-toe tender. Bright green chiles animate a stir-fry of julienne potatoes, cooked so fast they’re still stiff. They also bring not just spice but crunch to a classic Hunanese sauté of pork and garlic topped with an egg fried to a ruffled, golden crisp. The chiles knocked around in a very hot wok with sweet, juicy cabbage are small, red, sun-dried and noticeably fruity under their mouth-zapping heat.
The spice level is more subdued in the excellent stir-fry of pork and smoked tofu, and it’s almost undetectable in a very likable preparation of skinny eggplant sections topped with discs of bell pepper; the skins are left on the eggplants, which gives the appetizer something of the appearance of tuna maki wrapped with purple seaweed.
Meals tend to move quickly. For this you may be thankful on busy nights when those wood slats go from attractive design elements to unnervingly effective sounding boards. As in other Chinese restaurants in the neighborhood, the crowd tends to be young, bright, quick and eager to get on with the rest of the evening.
As the dinner rush ends, the howl subsides. Maybe ice cream is on the agenda, or a classic dessert soup of mung beans and barley in syrup. Or maybe a pot of tea, loose-leaf, brewed at the table while you think about chiles and rice and pork and wonder how many more Hunanese chefs can be persuaded to settle down in New York.
