Dickson's Chongqing Street Noodle dishes up authentic spicy Chinese noodles

Walk through the door of Dickson’s Chongqing Street Noodle, and you’re greeted by a cat.

Not a real cat, unfortunately, but the next best thing, a human-sized cat dressed as a grandma in a blue apron with white flowers. Her left arm is raised in a wave and her whiskers arched in a welcoming smile. And in a meta twist, you don’t see coming, she’s holding a little yellow, less human-like, cat.

Chongqing Street Noodle has been serving Chongqing-style street noodles on Woolley Street in Dickson since early 2019. If you aren’t familiar with the city of Chongqing, it’s just a wee little city of around 32 million people.

When I first visited Chongqing around 20 years ago, its population was under 20 million people, and even then it left an impression as the biggest city that I’d been to that I’d never heard of.

What left a bigger impression was the food. It was my first time eating Sichuan peppercorns (actually a berry, not a pepper). It was my first time eating Sichuan hotpot, and it was the first time I had ever seen a real-life food fight (the jovial kind, not a brawl).

It’s easy to forget how much Australia has evolved its tastes even in the last 20 years.

Returning from China, I sought out the flavours of the Sichuan province to no avail. I couldn’t even source a recipe for hotpot on the internet. Instead, I was left experimenting in a small fondue pot with various ingredients accessible in regional Australia.

It makes restaurants like Chongqing (pronounced chong-ching) Street Noodle feel like 20 years in the making, for me anyway.

Once you make it past the restaurant’s feline matriarch, the hard work starts, choosing what to eat.

The menu, while heavily noodle-based, as the name implies, also offers a good selection of accompanying dishes: bao, dumplings, rice bowls, dessert and noodles in soup form or dry.

The noodle range begins with completely approachable offerings: pork mince noodles, chicken noodles, tomato noodles, beef noodles and vegetarian noodle soups. They shouldn’t strike terror into the heart of anyone unless noodles are your secret nemesis (if that’s the case, you’re in the wrong place).

For the more adventurous, you can order pork trotter, beef tendon and pork intestine noodle soups. All good stuff and I personally recommend that if you want to dive in, start with the tendon (its greasy gelatinous texture is an easily acquired taste).

My dining partner and I chose a spread of sliced beef with hot and sour gold soup, traditional-style pork belly noodles, crispy pork nuggets with chilli powder, and hot and sour potato salad.

First up, it would be a crime to come here and not have the crispy pork nuggets. I know I have a thing for pork, but these are like juicy pork popcorn. Don’t be put off by the masses of red powder on top. I don’t know what it consists of, but it can’t be straight chilli as these moreish morsels are not that spicy. It does have the mouth tingle of the Sichuan peppercorn, though, something I can’t get enough of.

The hot and sour potato salad has julienned potato floating in a hot and sour sauce, much like you would get with dumplings. The sour component is Chinkiang vinegar, and the hot is Sichuan peppercorns, which have incredible mouth-numbing effects. Together, it’s a flavour bomb.

Sides aside, we’re here for the noodles.

The sliced beef with hot and sour gold soup is a beef bone broth that was surprisingly sweet. I’m sure I’ve had it before, and it was more sour; either way, it’s endlessly eatable.

The noodles are rice noodles, but you can customise them to a whole range of noodle varieties, and the beef is like you find in a hot pot, so thinly sliced it’s curled into a cylinder shape. The oversized wooden spoons are an indication of how much you will want to fill your mouth with the soups served here.

The traditional-style pork belly noodle is a dry noodle dish and packs more of a Sichuan pepper punch, but the heat can be customised on all dishes from mild to crazy hot. We went for medium. The overall heat primarily seems to refer to the numbing effects of sichuan pepper, in ours there was little in the way of red chilli but they possibly saw us coming and left it out. The pork belly leaves an oily coating on the noodles, which adds richness to the dish, and the pork belly is thin, sliced, and tender.

The serving sizes are large and very satisfying. In my world, pork doesn’t last long, but I’m ashamed to admit I couldn’t finish the service, but not for want of trying.

Chongqing Street Noodle is located at 19 Woolley Street, Dickson.