Cici Noodle Bar closed in March 2024. I’ve left the review up for posterity.
When I was younger, I loved the weekend when the clocks went back. Even though I had all the time in the world, that extra hour in bed felt like a gift from the cosmos. And now I’m uncomfortably ensconced in middle age I realise that the bonus sixty minutes aren’t remotely worth all the consequences: dark mornings when you go to work, dark evenings when you head home, drear and dreich everywhere. And the extra hour? I think I spent at least a quarter of it resetting the clocks and the time on the oven. It’s a crappy tradeoff.
I read online somewhere recently that we have to wait until something like next March before the sun sets after 6pm again. I looked at my phone, hoped I’d read it wrong, realised I hadn’t and just thought: please, god, no. I have one more holiday planned this year, to Malaga in December where the sun will still be shining, the sky still a striking photogenic shade of blue. The quality of light alone, I know, will lift my spirits. Is it wrong to check the weather there once a day without fail?
I know some people love autumn, love the chillier days, love crunching golden leaves underfoot – to be fair, who doesn’t love that? – love the slide into mulled wine, Strictly on the telly, preparing for Christmas and hibernation. Maybe other years I would too, but this year feels like it’s been an especially gruelling one: much of the time I find I’m just tired, and ready for it to end. Every month the stagger to payday feels a little more like running on fumes.
Back when I was married (last time, not next time) my in-laws had a wonderful phrase for feeling a little bit blue, possibly for no tangible reason. The can’t help its, they called it: you had a case of the can’t help its. I’ve carried on using that ever since, and it’s seemed very appropriate lately, more often than I’d like. And all the things that fix it – a beer during the week, a bar of chocolate munched in front of Bake Off – work on one level, but on another I know they’re just sticking plasters. Sticking plasters that make me fatter, more lethargic and probably, in the longer term, sadder. And social media, of course, is full of people who look as if they’re having a marvellous time.
So this week I left the house on a Friday evening looking for comfort, for a solo dinner before Zoë finished a late shift in town. And comfort – when it doesn’t mean chocolate, for me anyway – often means carbs. There’s something soothing and cosseting about carbs that, on some nights, little can touch. That’s why I made a beeline for Cici Noodle Bar, which opened about eight months ago on Queen Victoria Street in the space formerly occupied by the unlamented Donuterie. I hadn’t heard much about the place, but everything I had heard was good.
Cici closes at half eight, so it’s more a lunch or quick early dinner option like Kokoro next door. Arriving at around half seven I was greeted with a completely empty room and nobody behind the counter, a veritable Marie Celeste. It’s a pleasant enough space, but more functional than fun: if I could go back in time I’d buy some shares in whoever makes Tolix chairs, because it’s more noteworthy now when you turn up to a casual dining place and they don’t have masses of the bastard things. But even so, I didn’t mind it – the pillar box red chairs and black walls had a pleasing look to them. It just needed what all restaurants need really, people.
I was about to give up when a chap came in from the back room.
“Are you still serving?”
“Yes, sure” he said. Apart from a few subsequent Deliveroo drivers and a lady who turned up to get takeaway, I think I was to be his last customer of the evening. I placed my order, clarified that he brought it over and I didn’t have to go and collect it and then I went to sit at the high table up at the window. From there I looked out on Queen Victoria Street in the darkness, people scurrying to the station to head home after a hard day at work, or heading in the opposite direction towards the Oracle, their evenings about to begin. Maybe it was the fluorescent light, or that feeling of solitude in a crowd but I felt a like a cut price, low rent Redingensian Rick Deckard. A boy can dream, anyway.
Cici Noodle Bar’s menu, you may be unsurprised to hear, revolves almost exclusively around their hand pulled noodles. You can have them in broth, as ramen (the difference between these two isn’t really explained) or as they come. That’s pretty much it, barring a handful of sides, and most of their noodle dishes cost around a tenner. All very straightforward, and that kind of streamlined menu always inspires confidence in me.
I’ve never really got things like ramen – I tend to agree with the restaurant blogger Katie Low who once said they combine all the drawbacks of soup and of noodles without the benefits of either – so I went for a dish described as “dry noodles with beef brisket”. As you can maybe see from the picture below, it was emphatically a sauce free zone – I don’t think I was necessarily prepared for quite how dry it was. Noodles, pak choi, plenty of hefty chunks of beef, some coriander and a few translucent slices of radish. That was all. Had I made a mistake?
As it turned out, I hadn’t. I don’t always have the most nuanced palate, and I can sometimes equate subtle with boring. I tend to like crash bang wallop flavours like XO or gochujang, blue cheese or anchovies. Load up the salt or umami and I tend to be a happy man. So to slow down, strip back and taste this dish was really quite a revelation. The noodles were lovely – thick, somewhere between soba and udon, with just enough bite to make them interesting. The greenery added crunch, contrast and aromatics.
But the star of the show, with this dish, was the brisket. It’s too easy to wear out superlatives in this game, but this was easily some of the most tender beef I’ve eaten anywhere, surrendering to a fork – I was too much of a heathen to eat it with chopsticks – falling into flakes almost the way fish would. It had a surprising depth of flavour, too: maybe I was imagining it, overcompensating for the simplicity of everything else but I thought I detected something like star anise. Either way it was properly delicious. Even the few bits of fat there were, wobbly and gelatinous, were a glossy, moreish delight rather than a bouncy ordeal.
The other transformative component, though, was on the side. There were standard issue bottles of soy and vinegar but also, in a blue and white pot, there was laoganma, crispy chilli in oil, and a little teaspoon with which to dispense it. And dispense it I did, a little at first, then more and then more, the brick red savoury joy colouring everything in the dish and completing the experience. For those of you who haven’t had laoganma, which included me until recently, it’s made with chilli but not quite as punchy as you might fear, the whole thing given a sublime extra dimension with the addition of fermented black beans that lend extraordinary depth.
Without laoganma – it translates as “old godmother”, would you believe – my noodles were a very good dish. With it, they became great. By the end, as I dispatched those last nubbins of chilli-flecked brisket, I was dabbing my nose and pondering the possibilities: laoganma smudged on cheese on toast! Pastrami and laoganma sandwiches! Laoganma eaten out of the jar with a spoon! But although it elevated the dish, I did have to remind myself that the dish was pretty impressive already. What would the spicy chicken noodles be like, I wondered? Next time, I thought.
I wish I could be equally enthusiastic about the gyoza, but they fell a little flat. They tasted too much of the oil they had been fried in, and the oil tasted like it had done too much frying already. Perhaps that’s just the consequence of being their last customer on a Friday night, but it was a real shame because the gyoza themselves could have been good. I poured some soy and vinegar into the dish, which served to highlight the oil floating on the bottom of it, and made the best of a bad job.
Service was nice and friendly although the man behind the counter did wander off for long periods of time. That didn’t bother me at all, but another customer came in after me to order some food to take home and she nearly gave up after waiting for nearly five minutes with nobody behind the counter. “It’s really good, it’s worth waiting for!” I said between mouthfuls of brisket, persuading her to stay until the server returned. I’m glad I did, and hopefully she enjoyed her meal as much as I did mine.
But I suspect that, at the end of a long shift, the server was just keen to go home. That’s perfectly understandable, really. I also sense that he hadn’t been working there long – when he came to take my bowl away I told him how much I’d enjoyed my food and asked how long Cici Noodle Bar had been there, pretty standard restaurant small talk, but he didn’t know. My bill came to a stupidly reasonable fifteen pounds, not including service.
And it wasn’t until later when I checked my bank statement that I realised my payment had been made to Donuterie: if this was a case of Donuterie’s owner turning their hand to something else when the doughnut business failed they’d definitely done a far better job of it than, for example, that time that Italian restaurant Casa Roma rebranded as Maracas. Cici Noodle Bar, weirdly, felt a little like what that site should have been all along.
I’ve walked past Cici Noodle Bar, on the way home from work, a few times since I visited for this review and every time I’ve been really heartened to see customers in there. I really like what they do, and it definitely takes its place in the great pantheon of Reading noodle dishes like the exemplary chow meins at Kamal’s Kitchen and Sapana Home, not to mention the much missed duck noodles at Beijing Noodle House, the West Street institution that fed so many happy Reading diners on an affordable night out, many years ago. It could be the spiritual heir to the latter.
I’m yet to visit the obvious benchmark for Cici Noodle Bar, Marugame Udon which opened in March in the Oracle where Pizza Hut used to be. I got as far as walking through the door with Zoë, seeing that the layout was more like a cafeteria than a restaurant, thinking “sod this” and leaving again.
No doubt I will review it at some point, or at least I ought to. But even once I do I suspect my loyalties will probably lie with Cici Noodle Bar – slightly less polished, perhaps slightly less slick but delicious, independent and brave. It was warming, surprising and it definitely staved off the can’t help its, for a while at least. Or perhaps it was the laoganma: I must pick some up so I can carry out some controlled experiments in the comfort of my own kitchen.
Cici Noodle Bar – 7.5
27 Queen Victoria Street, RG1 1SY
0118 9090872
Edible Reading 