食為天麵食館

【Foodholic Niko @ Taipei】

"Food is Heaven Noodle House" is a noodle specialty shop located in the alleys around Zhongshan Station. It only serves noodles and small dishes and is about a 2-minute walk from Exit 5. Next door are more fancy ramen shops or Italian pasta restaurants, and suddenly seeing a place with 100NTD noodles is such a blessing for those on a budget (?)

On weekday evenings around 5 PM, the business is pretty good; the limited seating inside was already filled up, and there was a steady stream of takeout customers. I only ordered a bowl of dry noodles for takeout and waited about 10 minutes, which felt a bit long for just a bowl of noodles.

This place seems to mainly focus on soup noodles, as out of the 7 types of noodles offered, 6 are soup noodles. Other customers also ordered soup noodles; I was the only one who ordered dry noodles.

Private Recipe Dry Noodles $85
I feel the price is a bit high for what you get, which includes noodles, slices of pork shank, some cabbage, and kimchi. The noodles are made with ramen, which I quite liked; they have a chewy texture and don't turn mushy. The pork shank was quite generous, probably around 5-6 slices, and it didn't have any strange pork smell, so that part was fine.

The homemade kimchi with the dry noodles was quite special, and the kimchi was tasty. However, I found the overall seasoning of the noodle bowl lacking; it just didn’t have much depth. It felt like something was missing, hard to pinpoint. It’s not unpleasant, but it’s also not something I would crave or recommend to others.

Maybe I ordered the wrong item. If I visit again, I’ll likely try the soup noodles, but I won’t be returning to get the dry noodles.