We went to Noodle Lab with extremely high hopes, especially as we were missing Taiwanese food from our summer trip there with the family. We were excited by the relatively reasonable prices (in NYC, Taiwanese beef noodle soup seems to be approaching $20 a bowl on the regular) and variety of food on the menu. That the location is clean and the staff friendly set the stage for an epic meal!
And then the food came...
We ordered almost all of the appetizers. Note that the prices are small, but so too are the portions. The popcorn chicken wasn't very flavorful but worse yet, there was no yummy outside fried crunch. A good popcorn chicken should have a crisp (not necessarily like Korean fried chicken, but it is fried after all) exterior with a juicy, steaming interior of chickeny goodness. This lacked both of those latter features. The Taiwanese sausage was not very flavorful, and probably could use a bit more fat inside to bolster the flavor and juiciness also. Master Huang's sausages elsewhere in Queens are much better. The other sides were ok, a few of joked that the best food of the evening was the pickled cabbage.
The noodles were largely forgettable and one-note. I think their gimmick is that they give you a box with eight (8!) different noodle types to choose from. Then you realize that these are generally noodles that you could buy dried from the Chinese grocery store and you may be less impressed. Most of the group went for the hand-pulled noodles but the texture was not great and it lacked the chewiness ("Q" for you Taiwan food afficionados) that a good noodle should have. The broths were not great. The beef noodle soup was dominated by soy-salt flavor, and while there was a degree of an herbal tone in it, the complexity that you might get from a well-done Taiwanese beef noodle soup, the kind you might get at a hole-in-the-wall in Taipei with unlimited soup refills, was really lacking. It's not the worst beef noodle soup I've had in NYC, but it was certainly not objectively good. The meat was also a strange texture - some in group thought it tasted old, I think it was just not particularly well-made - or the timing was off and the texture seemed really odd. You know how sometimes, if you cook a beef stew for too long and the beef flavor essentially departs the beef (admittedly, to reside in a delicious soup/stew, which somehow this was lacking at the same time)?
The other noodles weren't particularly exciting. The pork chop noodle soup - the pork chop itself was fried a bit too thick, throwing off the texture of what should have been a savory coating to juicy pork (the former was also lacking itself to begin with). The thick noodle soup with pork may have been one of the better bets, but pales in comparison to how the dish tastes in Taiwan.
I am hoping that they keep working on these recipes. In essence, while the premise seems interesting and there is potential, the food itself was a dulled-down rendition of what you could find in Taiwan. As if you took all the colors and vibrancy of Taiwanese food and turned down the saturation and contrast by 50%. The food as of now tastes like what you could probably make experimenting with recipes available online and some good spice pouches from the Chinese grocery store on your third try. If they are committed to improving the food, I think the relatively focused menu could end up being good - the devil's in the details after all - but as of now, the one thing I will take from this place is an Asian elder's scowl and the familiar refrain in many Asian households of, "Why did we go out to eat food that I could have made better at home..."
tl;dr - three stars - two for food, one for cleanliness and friendliness/service; like Taiwanese food, but with little of the vibrancy that makes Taiwanese food actually good read more