It’s not hard to find good noodle soup in the Bay Area. Walk through most any city, and it won’t be long before a steamy finger reaches to tap you on the shoulder, the aroma of simmering broth and fragrant herbs beckoning you into a restaurant.
But what if you wanted something different from your standard bowls of ramen and pho? Something lesser known to wow your palate – a toripaitan with A5 Wagyu and smoked duck, say, a warming Burmese coconut soup, a cowboy take on pho with smoky brisket or Vietnamese bun bo hue (the “best noodle soup you’ve never tried”)?
Many restaurants are happy to oblige, if you know where to look. So pick up your chopsticks and spoon (or in one case, dinosaur-sized rib) and check out these hot spots perched around the Bay.
Ramen Hiroshi, San Ramon
Perched on the second floor of Bishop Ranch City Center, Ramen Hiroshi is stylish and — when it’s not raining — sun-drenched. A mural depicting a sea of wavy noodles adorns one wall, driftwood-style tables make the space both modern and intimate, and the menu offers more than a dozen varieties of ramen — plus two vegetarian options, if you’re dining at the San Ramon or San Francisco locations. (There are Ramen Hiroshi outposts in Walnut Creek and Alameda, as well.)
The yuzu vegetarian ramen ($17) is made with a steamy, surprisingly flavorful konbu kelp-based broth. Curly ramen noodles are topped with a soft-boiled egg, a slice of nori and a lotus root, which echoes the bowl’s black-and-white glaze. All in all, it’s a delicious bowl with a mild but pleasant kick on a chilly day.
Details: Open daily at 11:30 a.m. at 6000 Bollinger Canyon Road, Suite 2501, in San Ramon. Find details on all four locations at ramenhiroshi.com.
Cowboy Pho, San Jose
As one Yelper wrote, it takes a gutsy chef to come to San Jose — the city with the largest population of Vietnamese-heritage residents outside Vietnam — and try to carve out a niche in this pho-crazy market.
But Vinh Le, a Seattle-born restaurant consultant who learned the art of broth-making from his father, has done just that. The lightbulb moment occurred when Le, then living in Houston, a city known for both barbecue and pho, decided one day to put together some leftovers. He was a home pitmaster who had smoked brisket and made pho for friends the night before. He heated up some soup, tossed in slices of brisket — and a wondrous smoky pho was born.
At the new Cowboy Pho, his first brick-and-mortar after a number of pop-ups, Le is smoking prime American Wagyu brisket low and slow. Naturally, that tender and flavorful beef, with its beautiful bark, infuses the broth with smoky flavor and makes for a sublime bowl ($24).
He knew barbecue fans would love it. But he had one concern: How will this pho be received by the Vietnamese community, the purists? To his delight, “It’s been embraced by the OGs. Even the grandmas and grandpas! It blows my mind. And it absolutely boosts my confidence.”
What’s next? Le may experiment with smoked pork belly and wontons. He’s already added Cowboy BBQ Chicken Pho ($18) and a weekend special, Cowboy Brisket with Beef Rib ($40), to the menu. Not into smoky? Traditional bowls are available too.
Details: Open 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily at 221 E. San Fernando St., San Jose, in the Banh Mi Oven building; www.cowboypho.com.
Mensho, Oakland
This global ramen chain with a popular outpost in San Francisco arrived in Oakland last fall. The restaurant is known for luxury bowls with ingredients like Wagyu, porcini, smoked duck and truffle oil, which might seem like a gimmick, if it weren’t genuinely great. Walk in and you’ll encounter an array of shiny metal machines for cutting noodles. You might even bump into the Ramen Master himself, Tomoharu Shono, visiting from Japan for quality-control.
The signature dish is the Smoked Toripaitan with three smoked meats – A5 Wagyu, Kurobuta pork chashu and duck – as well as king oyster mushrooms, deep-fried enoki, fresh greens, “OG truffle sauce” and a smoked egg whose yolk is the deep color of amber ($23). The chicken broth is rich and profound with a pleasant campfire smokiness; it’s quite satisfying to pick through all the high-end ingredients for individual taste-tests. The surprise hit on the menu is the vegan ramen, of which there are at least five options. On a recent visit, a bowl of miso-turmeric ramen knocked it out of the park. With chewy mushroom batons, charred corn, red ginger and a tasty broth laden with drops of flavor oil, meat was the last thing on the mind.
Details: Open daily for dinner at 4258 Piedmont Ave., Oakland; menshopiedmont.com
So Gong Dong Tofu House, Palo Alto
One of the city’s least pretentious and most popular eateries boasts more than 1,700 rave reviews each on Yelp and Google. It’s understandable. The Korean restaurant, which opened in 2005, specializes in sundubu-jjigae, a spicy, soft tofu stew, but a key part of the experience is the generous selection of banchan, colorful sides served in small metal bowls ahead of the main dishes.
Neither the hearty portion size nor the tongue-scalding temperature stopped us from devouring an entire bowl of this rich, delicious soup. We started with the vegetable dumpling soft tofu soup ($19.94), adding thick, slurpable udon noodles and egg. Ordering your soup spicy really does mean spicy, so be prepared for significant heat.
Details: Open for lunch and dinner at 4127 El Camino Real, Palo Alto; paloaltotofuhouse.wordpress.com/.
Burma 2, Walnut Creek
The team behind Dublin’s Burma Burma opened their second location — Burma 2 — in Walnut Creek in 2019, offering its signature selection of Burmese noodles, curries and soups.
The ohn-no khao swe ($13) offers a vegetarian version of this Burmese coconut noodle soup typically prepared with chicken. The combination of soft noodles, crisp onion, generous vegetables and rich, coconut broth warm belly and soul. What’s the best way to eat those noodles without splashing broth all over the table? Using a fork to spaghetti-swirl the noodles and the small ladle of a spoon to scoop broth may not be pretty, but it’s effective — we quickly and happily slurped down the whole bowl.
Details: Open daily for lunch and dinner at 1616 N. Main St. in Walnut Creek; burma2.com.
Five Grains Noodle House, Fremont
“Five Grains” is an ancient Chinese concept of sacred crops that sustain civilization. At this casual restaurant, the five grains are literal: The noodle soup includes strands made from rice, buckwheat, millet, sorghum and corn. Each noodle variety has its own color, from ochre to white to pea-green.
Pickled green cabbage, fried-tofu pockets, whole quail eggs and a rainbow of noodles swim in the spicy-sour pork broth of the Pickled Pepper Flavor Grain Rice Noodles with Snakehead Fish ($16.95), but the glistening, tender pieces of stewed snakefish are the star. Snakehead fish is a ferocious-looking, invasive species on the East Coast and a delicacy in parts of Asia. It’s sumptuous and earthy, and makes a perfect match to the tangy pickles. Add in the free snacks of roasted peanuts and sweet daikon, and you have quite a memorable meal.
Details: Open daily for lunch and dinner at 34129 Fremont Blvd., Fremont; five-grains-noodle-house.business.site
Bun Bo Hue An Nam, San Jose
Bun Bo Hue, a soup with roots in the central Vietnam city of Hue, has been called pho’s spicy little cousin and the best noodle soup you’ve never tried.
Versions of BBH can be found around San Jose, but the bowl at this strip-mall restaurant off Story Road in Little Saigon is widely regarded as one of the best. It’s a bright, airy place that gets busy at lunchtime and on weekends.
Their Bo Hue Dac Biet (Spicy Beef Noodle Soup) is a bit of a misnomer, because you’ll also find plenty of porky goodness in this bowl. The chile-spiked broth is packed with spicy beef, mild slices of pork, a pork blood square, tendons and our favorite, two wedges of pork paste or cha lua, aka “Vietnamese mortadella,” all swimming around silky cylindrical noodles, sliced onions and aromatics. Shrimp paste, chile paste, jalapenos, bean sprouts and mint leaves come on the side.
There’s only one level of spiciness available for the flavorful broth, and the waitress estimated it as a six on a scale of 10. That was manageable, though the deeper into the bowl we went, the spicier the broth got.
The $16.50 small size is a very large bowl; the even larger size is just a dollar more.
Details: Open from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week (closed Tuesday) at 740 Story Road, San Jose; https://bunbohueannam.com/.
That Luang Kitchen Lao Cuisine, San Pablo
That Luang Kitchen is one of just a few really wonderful Laotian restaurants in the Bay Area. The restaurant credits its reputation to its papaya salad, which is served with fish sauce, garlic and lime juice and topped with tomato. The spacious, low-key restaurant was previously an Asian market, but thanks to the popularity of that papaya salad, was transformed into a restaurant instead.
We were drawn through the doors by the promise of gaeng nor mai soup made with bamboo shoots, black mushrooms and yanang leaf juice — sold out on a recent visit. But there’s an array of noodle soups to choose from, including a generous seafood pho ($14.99) boasting a clear, flavorful broth with calamari, seafood balls and imitation crab and shrimp atop a bed of rice noodles.
Details: Open for lunch and dinner Tuesday through Sunday at 1614 23rd St. in San Pablo.
Imm Thai Street Food, Berkeley
This narrow and bustling restaurant is half-taken up by an open kitchen, where the sound of banging woks mixes with the scent of coconut milk, grilled meats and spices hitting hot oil. Street food taken from family recipes is Imm Thai’s bread and butter – well, noodles and fish sauce – and it’s quite authentic, having been helped along by one of the owner’s moms in Thailand.
Yen Ta Fo or Pink Noodle Soup ($16) is a dish you’ll find at street markets in Bangkok. If you’re into seafood, this is the soup for you. First there’s the rich broth, whose red-orangish color – almost the hue of the Golden Gate Bridge – traditionally comes from fermented red-bean curd. It’s redolent of the ocean like good cioppino, with fresh spinach and a chile-boosted oil sheen that deliciously prickles the lips. The noodles are wide and flat and nestle a bounty of springy fish balls, perfectly cooked calamari and whole shrimp. The bowl is topped with a snowfall of crackly wonton pieces. It’s like the best of three worlds in Thai cuisine – drunken noodles, red curry and spicy soup. Eaten together, it is pure, noodlely goodness.
Details: Open daily for lunch and dinner at 2068 University Ave, Berkeley; immthaistreetfood.com
The Sister’s House, Hayward
Behind the tinted windows of this strip-mall fixture, you’ll find a warm, snug space staffed mostly by elderly Korean folks. There are perhaps 10 tables, a little fridge with imported beer and flavored soju and a back kitchen with smoky aromas of barbecued short ribs and seafood pancakes sizzling in cast iron.
Mul naengmyun ($15.99), or buckwheat noodles in cold beef broth, is a dish you might think of slurping on a sweaty summer day. But it’s great for wintertime, too, especially when ordered in a beef-on-beef combo with kalbi ($29.99). Thin, elastic noodles are twisted up and sunk in a supremely beefy broth with a tangy edge – typically, it comes from radish-kimchi brine. (There are containers of white vinegar and hot mustard, if you want to zest it up even more.) Toppings are a simple matter of hard-boiled egg, fresh cucumbers and a slice of beef. It’s something a monk might eat to cleanse the body – cool, refreshing, filling. In the combo, the mul naengmyun makes for a nice contrast to the heavier, fattier bone-on ribs. The soup also stands up to the bold flavors of the banchan, which arrive in a Trojan armada of pickled delights.
Detail: Open Tuesday-Sunday for lunch and dinner (closed Monday) at 21851 Mission Blvd., Hayward; sisterhouseinc.com
Honorable mention: Kajiken, San Mateo
We didn’t feel a roundup of noodle soups was the perfect spot to highlight this restaurant offering abura soba, a style of brothless ramen, but still want to recommend it if you find yourself hankering for really, really good noodles sans broth. You can even watch the noodles being made in-house through a window at the back of the restaurant. Kajiken is an international franchise and has locations in China, Japan, Singapore and New Zealand plus Chicago and Baltimore. Its San Mateo location has already earned a shout-out in the 2023 California Michelin guide.
Details: Open daily for lunch and dinner at 112 S. B St. in San Mateo; kajikenusa.com.