The hand-pulled noodle craze is on full display at new Denver restaurant

You don’t need to be well-versed in the history of hand-pulled noodles to be impressed by the gravity-defying act of stretching dough, which can be seen up close at a new Chinese restaurant in Denver.

Magic Noodle House, 1400 E. 17th Ave., opened late last year, intent on bringing the technique to central Denver, said Nina Zhang, the shop’s 30-year-old owner. Hand-pulled noodles originated in Lanzhou, the capital city of a province in northwest China, according to a well-documented history dating back more than 100 years. In the last decade, noodle shops dedicated to the craft have cropped up across the U.S.

Visible from behind a large window display, the cooks at Magic Noodle House take turns mixing dry flour with water in a machine, then pounding the resulting balls of dough and stretching them into oblivion. They flip, twirl and slap the dough until it begins to resemble a long rope, subdividing it into the strands that will become the base for the restaurant’s signature beef noodle soup.

It’s a tiring task, contorting dough up, down, left and right. The red t-shirts worn by the chefs hide no biceps. The whole process can take up to 40 minutes, by which point there are enough noodles to fill four bowls of soup, Zhang said.

A calligraphy piece with the Chinese symbols for “craftsmanship” hangs from the wall facing the kitchen, a reminder of what the staff is trying to emulate.

Another apt word is “showmanship.” Zhang’s business partner, Dianwei Sun, was an acrobat performer as a child and trained under a man named Guoming “Sam” Xin, Zhang said.

Xin later moved to the U.S. and opened his own hand-pulled noodle shops in Las Vegas, including inside the Sahara hotel. Xin and Sun then reunited in Denver, the former acrobatic instructor training the Magic Noodle House kitchen for two months on how to make the noodles and other Chinese dishes. (Xin couldn’t be reached for comment.)

“He’s our master chef. He [taught] us everything,” Zhang said of Xin. “He created all the sauces, all the menus, everything.”

Aside from beef brisket noodle soup, the restaurant makes its own buns and soup dumplings, rice dishes and appetizers like cucumber salad and chicken wings. It also stir-fries what Zhang called “sliced” noodles, cut with a knife and tossed with chicken, beef or tomato and egg.

Zhang and Sun both have other stints in the restaurant world, as well. Zhang runs Hana Matsuri Sushi in Westminster and Sun, she said, has two boba shops in Colorado Springs.

Zhang fell into the restaurant world by way of accounting, which she studied at CU Denver on a student visa from China. (She’s now a permanent resident.) Tired of balancing the books for other restaurants, she began doing so for herself.

“We just want American people to try our traditional Chinese food, to know more about it,” she said.

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