Everyday Eats: Drunken Noodles with Spicy Beef at GANG Kitchen
Erin Jackson
Good news for downtown dwellers (or workers) looking for legit Asian fare for lunch: GANG Kitchen now serves a mid-day menu stocked with daring fare, from Korean BBQ pork belly tacos to roast duck with scallion pancakes. Many dishes, including Executive Chef Jo Ann Plympton’s favorites (Drunken Noodles with Spicy Beef and Sesame Chicken) fall easily within Everyday Eats range. Only four items on the 26-item menu are over $12.
Everyday Eats: Drunken Noodles with Spicy Beef at GANG Kitchen
Erin Jackson
Drunken noodles are a personal obsession, and these are some of the best I’ve had anywhere. The broad chow fun noodles are tossed in two sauces: a hot and spicy chili-based sambal sauce, and a soy-based wok sauce. One’s spicy, the other is majorly umami-rich. The result: an explosion of flavor that had me toe-tapping under the table. Beneath the noodles is some top-notch hanger steak. It’s marinated in an oyster sauce and shockingly tender. You can request a caddy of hot sauces to spice the dish up further, but taste before you amp up the heat: it’s plenty spicy, exactly as served.
The sesame chicken is also excellent. Sweet, tangy, and just a bit crunchy, it’s great over rice and comes ringed with broccolini and red pepper, so you can get your daily dose of vegetable roughage. To counterbalance the bitterness of the broccolini, drag it through the shallow pool of orange sauce under the chicken en route to your mouth.
Dishes are portioned large enough to share (something GANG highly encourages), so it’s best to initiate a pre-ordering pow-wow and formulate a plan of attack. No matter which dishes you land on, make sure one of them is the drunken noodles.
GANG Kitchen is located at 345 6th Ave, downtown (map). Lunch is served from 11:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., seven days a week.
