La Maison du Nord and the Secret of Magic Noodles

La Maison du Nord
2130 St-Mathieu (look for the number on the door, not the name)
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6 1/2 out of 10

I walked up St-Mathieu from Maisonneuve, then turned right on Lincoln, right again back onto Maisonneuve, over to St-Marc...where is this place? It was 11:30am and I was looking for noodles and the sign-less restaurant La Maison du Nord.

Actually, there is a sign, and it does say "Restaurant", but the words "La Maison du Nord" are certainly not to be seen in either of Canada's official languages. I shamefully walked into Le Roi du Wonton and asked the lady where I could find the actual restaurant I was looking for. It felt like maybe I should order some wontons for the road (1 block, just around the corner) for so rudely leaving the place with the intent of finding lunch elsewhere. Finally I got back to St-Mathieu, having gone full cirlce, and found La Maison du Nord on the east side of the street, just south of Lincoln ((2130 St-Mathieu)...basically where I had thought it should have been in the first place. Look for the number and the sign saying "coiffure" and you'll have no problem finding the place.

The whole reason for wanting to come here was to try the "magic" noodles. There is one chef who is capable of taking a long strand of dough and stretching it, pulling it, and miraculously shaping it into a giant soup bowl's worth of glutinous noodles. I sat myself in front of the open window to the kitchen and waited to be amazed. I expected to see noodles flying through the air, being spun, twirled and dangled.

In fact, the whole stretching process seemed kind of boring. The man had obviously stretched a whole lot of noodles in his life and he made it look no more complicated than shuffling a deck of cards. Actually, the first time he did it I didn't even notice. He kept his subtle hands under the opening of the kitchen window. I felt cheated because I figured my noodles had actually been machine-stretched as there had been no show made of the whole magic noodle creation, which didn't make sense because I had been warned that it would be a 20 minute wait for the noodles, since the chef had just arrived. This in itself made me skeptical because noodles take a whole lot longer than 20 minutes to make from start to finish usually. You need to combine the dough, knead it, let it rest for awhile, sometimes knead it again, sometimes let it rest again. All in all, it can be a long process. So I'm going to hope that much of this process was pre-done, and the dough had been prepped in advance of the "magic" noodle chef's arrival.

You can have these noodles in a whole lot of different kinds of meal soups. I had the noodles in a lamb broth. Most of the options are beef, but you can also get tomato and egg. Vegetarians are a bit out of luck , but maybe you could just get the noodles by themselves??

A giant bowl of steaming noodles with shaved, tiny pieces of delicious lamb came to the table. It was topped with a heaping pile of tasteless green onions, along with some also bland carrots, but the highlight of the bowl was the cabbage, which was perfectly al dente and sweet.

At least the soup, unlike the noodle throwing, didn't let me down. The broth was surprisingly un-salty, which is definitely atypical of noodle soups in Montreal. Maybe, just maybe, they didn't add a ton of MSG to the broth. Maybe it was actually mostly flavoured by the lamb? I was overjoyed to find that the broth was just a little spicy. It wasn't too greasy, either, which is both a good and a bad thing. It means it was either skimmed of fat, which is unlikely, or a whole chunk of lamb was not used (as would be traditional) to make the broth, but it didn't feel like I was wading through fat to find broth.

After being let down by my expectation of the "magic" noodle show, at least the noodles themselves were pretty good. They were filling and comforting and just what a bowl of noodle soup should be, even if for some reason they didn't have any distinguishable noodle taste, like when you make fresh pasta with a really good quality flour. With a bit of black vinegar, though, they were so satisfying, and a great addition to the rest of the soup fillings.

I had to try the dumplings to compare them to Qing Hua down the road. The dumpling wrapper here was thinner, and the fillings weren't as juicy. In my shrimp, chive and and egg dumplings I had a hard time finding any shrimp. I would have liked them better if the sauces that accompanied them were better. The hot sauce didn't taste like anything. I'm pretty sure it was just chili flakes and oil, so it really didn't help the dumplings out at all. The black vinegar was good, but I'd had enough of that with the soup. The soy sauce provided was just packets of Wings. Does the trick, I guess.

The exciting part of the meal for me ended up being the dishes that you don't find in every other Chinese restaurant. The Northern Chinese (Shaanxi) dishes, like a side dish of spicy shredded raw potatoes in a salty, spicy, and sour sauce, were delicious! They kind of tasted like noodles, and certainly looked the part. It would be an amazing lunch if Montreal's raw foodists got together at the very un-vegan La Maison du Nord to talk about the values of noodles made of potatoes and turnips.

Finally a sweet baked flatbread filled with a periodically sweet sesame paste. "Periodically", because whoever made the paste didn't stir in the sugar very well, so some bites were sweet and some were savoury, which was actually pretty fun. One bite would taste like natural peanut butter, and the next would taste like Kraft's sweet and salty version. The bread was beautiful. Kind of like a Northern Chinese version of naan. It had the most flavour of all the doughy foods I tried. The wheat flour definitely won out over the glutinous flour used for the noodles.

The price? Ridiculously affordable. Even though you can get a dozen dumplings here for $8, which beats Qing Hua's pricing, I'd still say it's worth it to "splurge" down the road. It's all relative, since it's not like Qing Hua is particularly expensive in the grand scheme of Montreal restaurants. The Maison du Nord sweet bread was $2.99, and makes a great snack for two at any time of the day. You can get lamb soup for $3.99, but with the noodles it gets bumped to $7.99, which is basically two meals of soup and so, so many noodles. You could also come here and order main dishes (mostly pork-based, or fried fish and vegetables) for slightly more money (around $8-$10 a dish), and leave happily stuffed or with leftovers. Whatever you get, you won't spend a fortune and you'll be very full. Oh, and tax is included!

Hours: 11am-11pm, daily
Expect to Pay: $8 to be full, $14 to have to roll yourself out of there...
514-670-3188

Qing Hua

Qing Hua

1676 Ave Lincoln
Montreal, QC
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7 out of 10

Maybe Dalian? From somewhere in China anyway...

There's one thing about this place that's really bothering me...Where in China does the food originate? China's huge and dumplings are ubiquitous. At first I thought it was from Qinghai which sits landlocked in the middle of China, next to Tibet. Then I thought it was from the south, then for about 10 seconds I thought it might come from Shanghai, then maybe Beijing, and now I hear it comes from Dalian, a coastal city in Liaoning Province to the Northeast, about halfway between Beijing and North Korea. So I have a lopsided triangle of dumpling-origin options on a map of the giant Chinese land mass.

Trying to detective dough through China is an almost thankless task. Only 'almost', because it fortunately results in some kind of dumpling or noodle even if you're wrong.

A million foodies and critics have written this place up already, so I don't need to tell you about some hidden gem where you just have to try the lamb and coriander steamed dumplings or the pork and cabbage boiled. They're tasty. Moving on...

What makes this place interesting is that the dumplings are home-made, there's apparently no added MSG, and you actually have to wait for your meal like the patient person that you are since your dumplings are made-to-order on a little counter visible from the dining room; magic hands shaping dough and fillings into carefully-wrapped bundles.


These are not wontons. These are not not dim sum steamed gauu. These are not Tibetan momos. These are not steamed Xiaolong bao buns, like the ones with curry beef and BBQ pork.

I was lucky to have a meal here with three Japanese gyoza connoisseurs, whose first reactions were emphatically that it was certainly not like gyoza. The dumpling wrappers were very thick and the filling was garlic-free. So I'm lead to believe these are Jiaozi, a generic term for wheat-wrapped dumplings, generally coming from the North of China.

At first I foolishly thought the restaurant's Chinese origins may be in Qing Hai. Maybe there was a spelling/pronunciation/translation issue between the name of the restaurant and the name of the region? I assume I'm wrong on this, but in a great reference book for Chinese food traditions, Beyond the Great Wall by Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford, they give a jiaozi dumpling recipe from Qing Hai that says that lamb and coriander is a common substitute for ground pork in this region. Turns out lambs aren't stationary animals and, at some point in the thousands and thousands of years of Chinese history, made their way all across the country, not just to Qing Hai province. So I'm a fool. Supporting my Qing Hai region of origin theory, however, was the fact that for awhile this restaurant was offering "Magic" Noodles, noodles stretched from one long noodle, like a seemingly endless game of cat's cradle. Back to my Chinese reference book...

These are called Uighur Flung Noodles and come from Xinjiang, which borders Qing Hai to the northwest. Close enough geographically to allow a little bit of food tradition transfer. But apparently the chef who used to make these noodles has left, and to me that shouts that he wasn't part of the restaurant family. So maybe he's from that area but the restaurant owners and dumpling-makers are not? I don't know too many Chinese who leave their family restaurants, then go across the street and teach another restaurant's chef (at Maison du Nord) to make your special noodles.


Okay, so then I thought Shanghai. The dumplings are innapropriately called "soup-dumplings". Yes, they burst with liquid when you bite into them, (which is both hilarious and disastrous. Messy is fine, but projectile soup is definitely for the adventurous. Not what you want to eat when you have something to look presentable for after lunch or dinner. Of course, you could turn it into a game and come to the restaurant regularly with you soup-spitting team to practice, just get team bibs instead of uniforms), but I saw the dumplings being made and there's no soup actually put into the dumplings. Nor are they served in soup. It's just a few teaspoons of meat mixture. In Shanghai "soup-dumplings" are made by adding gelatinized soup to the filling, so when the dumplings are steamed the soup liquifies. Thus soup in dumplings. Gelatinized soup...tasty...but I figured this was wrong because nothing else here shouted Shanghai and it killed the "North thick wheat-wrapper theory". Probably the filling is just incredibly moist from the meat and moisture in the filling. Lamb is fatty and when it's as tender as it is in these dumplings, the juices would definitely squirt out. The other fillings are probably just not dry. They're maybe tenderized before? Kind of in the way that meat is pre-marinaded to make it tender for other kinds of cooking. Any other theories?

So then I figured Beijing, since Qing Hua University is built on the site of Qing Hua Garden, an imperial villa in Beijing. Finally I read that the restaurant was officially "Dalian", a good ways east of Beijing. Oh, I don't know. It's north, so thick dumpling wrappers still applied. Lamb is everywhere, so that wasn't a deal-breaker. It's sort of close to Beijing and the reference to Qing Hua Gardens. Screw it. If the rest of the world can take Asian cuisine and combine it with way too many other things to call it "fusion", why can't Chinese people make whatever kind of dumplings and wrappers they want? Take flour and water and wrap meat in it. I mean, Indians call them samosas, South Americans call them empanadas, Italians call them ravioli, Jamaicans and Trinidadians call them patties or doubles. Variations on a theme. So Chinese cuisine has fused a little and as long as no traditions are lost, we, the eater, are the beneficiaries.


So try the mackerel ball soup. Mackerel and green onion balls doused in lemon (to get rid of the fishy taste), in home-made broth. Who knows where these balls come from? It's a big argument for Dalian because it was my only coastal option. Fish don't even have to walk themselves to new regions, though, thanks to salt, smoke and freezer trucks. Try the dumplings boiled, steamed and fried and see what you like. Don't judge them against anything else. They're not trying to be anything but exactly what they are.

A few notes: The cooks use clothespins to identify the steamer baskets full of dumplings. It would be an awful day spent not knowing which basket was which, since the dumplings seemed to be all wrapped the same.

The cooks could be from different places and were trained one way by the restaurant owners. It may not have been just the Magic Noodle man from outside the family or region of origin.


You can order for pick-up, or buy some of the dumplings frozen at half the cost. You have to buy them in quantities of 30, apparently.

The miso soup and salad that come at the beginning of the meal are...nice because you'll be hungry waiting for the dumplings, but nothing special. Bean sprouts were way too sweet and miso was not the greatest quality. I'm fine with this because the restaurant obviously spent so much more time, money and effort making the dumplings well and with good-quality ingredients, and it's a nice thought to try to provide something to snack on since so many people complained about actually having to wait for their food when this place first opened. Geez, try making polite conversation with your dining companion...or read a book, maybe it will open your mind to being more considerate. Lamb doesn't grind itself, wrap itself with magically-chopped coriander in dough that's been kneaded, stretched and rolled, and stick itself in an appropriately-clothes-pinned steamer basket, then deliver itself to your table hot, fresh and perfectly-cooked.

Price: $8-$14 for 16 steamed dumplings

Expect To Pay: $15-$25 to be absolutely stuffed

Hours: 11am to 11pm everyday!
(438) 288-5366
Credit cards and interac not accepted! Cash only!