Carlton’s own noodle masters

In a quiet back street, just off the southern end of Lygon St, Kevin Huang and Xinyan Wang have been making some of Melbourne’s best noodles since 2017. 

Hi Chong Qing is a tiny restaurant with a tiny menu of just four dishes, but each one is a classic of the street-side noodle shops in the southwestern Chinese city of Chongqing.

Each dish is based on fresh wheat noodles and either a rich bone-based, or vegetarian, broth. There are a variety of different toppings such as crunchy peanuts, fried eggs, pork mince and chickpeas, tender braised beef, or, for the more adventurous, gelatinous beef tendon.

Chongqing is famous among Chinese people for its characteristically bold and spicy flavours, in Chongqing there is no mild option.

At Hi Chong Qing, Kevin has bended to local tastes by dialling down the level of Sichuan pepper and allowing customers to select between varying spice levels. Still, even the mildest spice level packs a punch, because the combination of chilli and Szechuan pepper are key to the mala flavour characteristic of Chongqing cuisine.

Kevin, who grew up in Melbourne, met Xinyan when she came here on holiday. After two rejections, Xinyan let Kevin take her out for dinner at Tiamo on Lygon St. Now, more than 10 years later they are married and running their own restaurant barely a kilometre away.

It was on a trip back to Xinyan’s hometown of Chongqing that Kevin first tried the noodles that have become their life’s work. Soon after, he quit his corporate life as a business analyst to train under a man the couple refer to as “the noodle master”.

Xinyan’s father was a regular customer of the noodle master and was able to talk him into teaching the couple the art of Chongqing noodles.

“It’s only because we were outsiders that he was willing to teach me,” Kevin said, adding that they would never be in competition with him.

According to Kevin major challenge was that the noodle master cooks on instinct with no measurements, so it was a painstaking process to turn the master's embodied knowledge into recipes.

He filmed many videos in the kitchen with the noodle master, translated from Chongqing dialect by Xinyan, and made charts to make sense of the intricate broth making process. Upon returning to Australia, the process required further adjustments to get the right flavour out of Australian produce.

Xinyang has joked about displaying her Chinese identity card at the counter as many Chinese customers insist on checking that someone is authentically from Chongqing before eating.

Despite all of their efforts, and now eight years of experience, Kevin and Xinyan don’t think they have yet achieved the title of “noodle masters”.

“Maybe if we open a second shop,” Xinyan said, to which Kevin agreed.

“Yeah, if we scale bigger, we could probably call ourselves noodle masters then,” Kevin said.

Despite their early success they came close to putting the restaurant up for sale at the beginning of last year.

“COVID was really tough for us,” Kevin said. “To be honest we were this close to giving up,” adding that it wasn’t until mid-2024 that business returned to normal.

Now that things have finally stabilised again, Kevin and Xinyang are feeling optimistic about the future.

“I think people here are beginning to realise that there are many different cuisines around China, so if you like spicy food you should definitely come down and try us,” Kevin said. •