Noodle Works – Albuquerque, New Mexico
“To witness the birth of a noodle is a glorious thing. I have listened, spellbound, as an 85-year-old noodle chef in Beijing told me why the act of making noodles helped him make sense of the world.” -~Terry Durack, Noodle In the movie Mr. Nice Guy, martial artist cum actor Jackie Chan portrays a chef with a successful television show. In the movie’s opening scene, Chef Jackie is presiding over a flour-dusted table, stretching, twisting, and pulling a piece of dough into fine strands of noodles, a process the TV host can only describe as “alchemy.” For the culinary obsessed among us, that was the highlight of the movie, all the “special effects” we needed. Later on, Chef Jackie would be stretching, twisting and pulling a drug lord and his syndicate in much the same manner as he did the noodles. There’s something almost mystical about the artisan process of pulling noodles by hand. Certainly for the onlooker, it’s entertaining to the point of being mesmerizing. It’s not prestidigitation in that there’s no sleight of hand to deceive you. It’s sheer brilliant mastery of an time-honored craft. It’s performance art and scientific precision in one. Learning to repeatedly stretch…