At 77 years old, Li Quan Chen is back behind the noodle counter, hand-pulling and knife-cutting dough for hours a day inside a tiny storefront that used to be a Subway sandwich shop. His new restaurant, Meet Noodle, sits at the corner of North Garfield and East Newmark avenues in Monterey Park — just a block south of the original restaurant that helped put the San Gabriel Valley on the map for Sichuan food two decades ago.
Chen co-ran that earlier restaurant, the original Chung King, with a business partner, according to the Los Angeles Times. Chung King is credited with helping introduce dishes like shui zhu yu and la zi ji to local diners and is remembered as the restaurant responsible for the Sichuan wave that swept the San Gabriel Valley in the early 2000s, per the same report. Chen later moved on to Rosemead, opening Best Noodle House and narrowing his focus to Chongqing street noodles, including dan dan and youpo styles.
That run ended when family health issues and the pandemic pushed Chen into early retirement, and he sold the Rosemead restaurant, the Times reports. Retirement didn't stick. Chen and his wife, Wei Sun Liu, opened Meet Noodle at 309 S. Garfield Ave., Unit A, this past summer, bringing him back to the same stretch of Monterey Park where his career in Sichuan cooking first took off.
A Menu Built on Heat, Vinegar and Hand-Pulled Dough
Meet Noodle's menu leans into the techniques Chen has spent decades refining. He makes both hand-pulled and knife-cut noodles for braised beef noodle soup and for the restaurant's signature fiery Chongqing bowls, according to the Times. The menu also includes thin, chewy rice noodles, glass noodles, hand-pulled xiaomian and knife-shaved dao xiao mian.
The Chongqing noodles themselves arrive in a pool of hot broth and chile oil, laced with minced ginger and garlic, sesame paste and house-pickled cabbage, the Times describes. Chen makes his own pickled greens and cabbage in-house, and he grinds dried chiles imported from Chongqing, China, to produce his hot chile oil from scratch. Other bowls on the menu include hot and sour glass noodles in a tangy, vinegar-sharp chile broth and tomato and egg noodles, which the Times calls surprisingly tame, featuring a rich, slightly sour tomato broth loaded with tomato wedges and scrambled egg.
Beyond noodles, Meet Noodle serves Chongqing wontons plump with pork, swimming in a broth spiked with enough chiles to turn the liquid scarlet, and popcorn chicken cut into bite-size nuggets and dusted with hot chile powder. Meet Noodle's own DoorDash listing also describes a classic hand-pulled beef noodle dish, with tender noodles, sliced beef and green onions in a savory broth.
A Family Effort, Six Days a Week
Chen's daughter, Lu Chen, flew in from her home in Canada to help her parents get the restaurant off the ground. She told the Times she first learned about the project after spotting a lease agreement in her father's email. Since then she's pitched in at the restaurant alongside her parents, who now work six days a week after she persuaded them to finally take Sundays off — a schedule that still has Chen logging roughly 10.5 hours a day on his feet.
For Chen, the motivation is simple. “I opened this shop simply because I love it so much,” he told the Times, describing Meet Noodle as a passion project meant to preserve the flavors of his hometown. He added that the work has given him a renewed sense of purpose, saying he feels his life has meaning again now that he's back making noodles.
Joining a Crowded Noodle Scene
Chen's return lands in a San Gabriel Valley where Chongqing-style dishes have become common, with the Times noting that the style can now be found all over the region and in cities across the country. San Gabriel's Chong Qing Special Noodles, reviewed years earlier by the Times' Jonathan Gold, was itself described as something of a spinoff of Best Noodle House — its chef had left Chen's old Rosemead restaurant to open the San Gabriel location, serving thin, bouncy Chongqing noodles tossed with vegetables, pork and a hard-fried egg.
Other regional noodle destinations highlighted by Eater LA include Shaanxi Garden in San Gabriel, known for its biang biang mian made with thick hand-pulled noodles and chili oil, and Mian, which serves Chengdu-style zajiang noodles, Chengdu-style hot and sour noodles and Szechuan cold noodles. More recently, Monterey Park's own Chopin Noodle House — opened by former piano teachers Zi Yang and Mimi Song and now grown to five locations, according to LAist — has built a following around its Lanzhou-style beef noodle soup and eight different noodle cuts. Against that backdrop, Chen's small storefront offers something more personal: a 77-year-old craftsman, back where he started, still pulling dough by hand.
