COOKS & CHEFS

The Magic of Lanzhou

HandPulled Noodles
How to work your way up the ranks.
By CHRISTOPHER ST. CAVISH

Art by JIA LI

W
u Mu Le (pronounced Woo Moo Luh) is a hand
pulled noodle shop in Lanzhou, the capital of hand
pulled noodles. In the two decades it has been in
business, its reputation for its fatty beef brisket has
grown along with its footprint: it now occupies a
spacious storefront that ts in neatly with the car showrooms along the
northern bank of the Yellow River. Theres only one Wu Mu Le in China,
and Zhang Yu, the founder, says its going to stay that way, even as
investors scramble to KFCify Chinas handpullednoodle industry.

The hierarchy of a handpullednoodle shop goes like this: You are a young
kid with peach fuzz and rosy cheeks. You start in the noodle room. For a
year or two, you learn to mix the noodle dough in massive quantities.
Handpullednoodle restaurants in Lanzhou describe how busy they are in
bag termshow many ftykilogram bags of wheat our they use in a day.
The busiest ones, like Wu Mu Le, use eight to ten. Each bag makes 170 to
180 bowls of noodles. Each bowl of noodles costs a U.S. dollar. But you
wont be involved with the money for a long, long time. For now, youll be
working that dough one ftykilogram sack of our at a time. By hand.

After having your forearms toughened up as a dough grunt, you will learn
the noodlepulling process from the older guys, the ones whomight have
the beginnings of a mustache. The secret to making handpulled noodles
is the ash. About a hundred years ago, Ma Baozi, who has gone down in
noodle history as the inventor of Lanzhou la mian, discovered that by
adding a little of the potash other cooks were using for steamed buns, he
could pull dough out into noodles. The ash was made from an alkaline grass
native to the area, in a laborious process that involves digging a bigass
hole and building a re, heating and cooling the ash until it turns into a
solid rock, and then cracking and dissolving that rock into water, all to
make a liquid that then gets sprinkled on the dough. It is the pixie dust that
makes the dough stretchy and the noodle chewy.

The traditional ashmaking process was a major pain in the ass, and the
plant can contain heavy metals, so in the 1990s, Lanzhou University
modernized and commercialized the process. These days, just about
everyone uses the rened chemicalmostly potassium carbonatewhich
is sold as handpulled additive for about a dollar a pound.

Wu Mu Le doesnt go for that. You will still be using the traditional ash,
dissolved in water to make a swampy green liquid. Is it better? Probably not
though Mr. Zhang thinks it gives the noodles more bite and, more
important, helps with digestion. Is it a laborious extra step? Certainly.

Youll be standing on the shoulders of all that chemistry and history as you
pull a cord of dough out into strands over and over and over again.

If youre lucky, you might skip this step and head straight to point man.
You will be the one who shouts back the orders with their attendant
specic noodle thicknesses (two no. 2 ne! One hairthickness! A medium
ribbon!) and deals with the long line of customers. In Lanzhou, every single
person has a preferred conguration of diced raw leek, chopped coriander,
and chili oiland its your job to get that conguration right for the fteen
hundred bowls customers who will pass in front of your little window order
during the day. They will wave their ticket from the cashierthe
waitresses only clear tablesand you will be fast or you will die. If youre
really good, like the point men at Wu Mu Le, youll develop this dancing,
swaying rhythm as you grab the bowl of
freshly cooked noodles from your
partner with your left hand, ladle in the
soup (yesterdays cooking liquid for the
beef brisket, plus a few slices of daikon),
ick the exact amount of leek and
coriander out of your blueandwhite
ceramic bowls onto the noodles, and
then execute a technical move involving
a massive bowl of chili oil and an
inexplicably skinny and longhandled
spoon that results in the crimson oil
oating like a cloud on top of the broth,
even though it really wants to just sink
to the bottom. That is your art.

As a bonus, you will arrive at work at 5 a.m. because in Lanzhou, beef

noodles are a breakfast food.

If you happen to be older, you may land a spot in the beef kitchen or at the
beef counter. This is where the fourtosixhundred pounds of brisket and
shank are transformed every day, passing through a stock thats heavily
spiced with Sichuan peppercorn, Chinese black cardamom, star anise, and
any number of other roots and seeds. You will have an iron ga, for hooking
the whole briskets and pulling them over the side of the cauldrons onto
woven bamboo trays, like a rst mate hauling a tuna over the bow.

You start in the morning but you are really working for tomorrow. The
meat needs to cool. The foyer near the cashier seems as good a place as any,
especially since the last briskets wont be done cooking until about 1 p.m.,
and there will be hardly any customers by then. In Lanzhou, beef noodles
are also acceptable for lunch. But not dinner.

The meat is heavy but the pressure isnt as intense. Its the right job for
you, Older Guy.
Alternatively, you might score a plum gig at the beef counter, with the
ladies. The three of you will carve yesterdays briskets and shanks into
thick slices by hand, which people will buy by the plate to drape over their
hot noodles or by the pound to take back to the city or town they came
from. Your scale technology is still an iron weight and balance beam but
your vacuum packing is uptodate.

The Mazilu chain is the most touristy of all the noodle brands in Lanzhou,
but plenty of tourists nd their way to Wu Mu Le too, for the beef. They
heard this is where the locals eat, and now they need four pounds to go for
their ight back to Beijing. Youll sweep the imperfect slices and inevitable
meat crumbs o to one side. They will go over to the noodle kitchen to be
tossed into the soup. But thats not your worry. Take the ticket, weigh out
the meat, rinse, repeat. That is your job. Keep going. You are not far now.
The cashier is just over there.

In theory, the cashiers counter is the promised land. This is the point of
entry for all the thousands of customers that come in every week, but your
job is easy. Everyone is having the beef noodles. Seven RMB. $1. Most will
have a side of beef. Some will add a side of garlicky cucumbers or a plate of
radishes. There are other things up there on the signboard above your head,
but no one orders them. Why would they? You take their cash, make their
change, and give them their chit. There is no more dough to beat or noodles
to pull. Life is a beach.

Reality may be dierent. No one has actually made it all the way to cashier
yet. So far, thats been the domain of the family, the spot where Mr.
Zhangs eightythreeyearold father sits most days, watching the world
come and go. No, the cashiers counter is a glass ceiling, and Mr. Zhang
looks to have a few more decades in him still. What can you do? Say your
goodbyes. Walk out through the front doors onto Riverside Street, cross
the bridge over the Yellow River into downtown, and openwhat else?
another handpulledbeefnoodle shop.

CHINA, CHINESE FOOD, LANZHOU, NOODLES