Bob's 66 Noodle Bistro

A much lauded restaurant in suburban Maryland (Cowen here, but he links to all reviews), the clientele of Bob's 66 Noodle Bistro bears witness to its status as the best (or at least most authentically good) Chinese food in the area. The menu's unusual, and packed with spices and offal. To celebrate, I ordered a cold pig's ear salad to start. It was crunchy, and gelatinous, and meaty all at the same time, the potentially overbearing pork wonderfully offset by a searing spice. While I was nibbling at that (and half is with me today for lunch), my thick noodle soup with squid and mushrooms arrived. I could have done without either the tough squid or the relatively flavorless mushroom, and with more of the tasty noodle and broth. In fact, I just turned it into a noodle soup with my spicy fried squid balls, which arrived shortly later and tasted wonderful dunked in the soup (I'm not sure how much I insulted people by doing this, but then, it's not that kind of place).

I'll be back. There's a duck tongue dish on the menu, and I saw an even thicker noodle in someone's plate that I'm going to have to locate. My only problem with restaurants like this is that one is always suspicious that everyone else has a menu you have to make an effort to extract. Even so, the public menu's pretty good.