There’s a new restaurant near the Arborland mall… Actually, is it still appropriate to call it a mall? They’ve eliminated the old ‘large building enclosing lots of shops’ mall motif in favor of the ‘lots of shops all facing the street in a row’ style of shopping. I suppose it still qualifies for the ‘mall’ moniker inasmuch as it’s a ‘strip’ mall, but I digress.
I was talking about the Noodle Company.
I suspect this is one of the advanced scouts for the midwest expansion of a chain of restaurants that exists on either the east or west coast. If so, it’s a pretty good bet that we’ll be seeing more of these places cropping up. I, for one, welcome our pasta-based future overlords.
The basic idea behind their food is simple: Anything you want, so long as a noodle of some type is involved. The group I was with ordered things ranging from Japanese Udon (a wheat based noodle) to Mac & Cheese with digressions including Lo Mein and Mushroom Stroganoff. All of them were darn good. No paste-like overcooked noodles. No goopy cheese or limp veggies. The food was nice, fresh, tasty, filling and surprisingly inexpensive.
The restaurant was moderately crowded, and kind of noisy, but they have an outdoor dining area too for folks that would rather listen to passing traffic than other people’s conversations. The place gets a big thumbs up from me…