Never Forget Super Noodle House

Whatever happened to Super Noodle House? One minute it was there, a high temple of roasted meat next to the main entrance of Sungei Wang. Then suddenly it was closed, boarded up, dark inside when I pressed my nose against the glass. I waited and prayed, hoping that Super Noodle House would rise again, a phoenix from its fiery gas burners. But instead we got Cotton On and Taiwan Snowflake. Like we need another fucking Taiwan Snowflake.

I can’t say that I have been going to Super Noodle House ever since I can remember going to Sungei Wang, because in the beginning there was Wendy’s. In a dim forgotten corner up many many escalators, as children we consumed limp burgers and shakes at Wendy’s with never-to-be-repeated gusto. For those who thought that this particular fast food brand only arrived in Kuala Lumpur in the past decade (ahem, Time Out KL) I will tell you it was definitely Wendy’s, she of the Pippi Longstocking braids and freckles and the Tiffany lamps.

So Wendy’s came first, but ever since I started making my own decisions about where to eat, and for a long time before that, there was Super Noodle House. And a visit to Super Noodle House was for one thing only — roast duck noodles.

“Dry one or soup?”

“Dry one!”

While sitting at the plastic tables, waiting for the noodles to arrive — roast meat chopped on a grease-marinated wooden block at the front of the shop, slid onto a plate of wantan mee and vegetables transferred from the back kitchen — you could eat the crunchy prawn chilli sambal from the sauce bowl, delicately, with chopsticks. You could buy that sambal, too, as I once did, to take it to the States during college, to warm my freezing winter days. For some reason I never ate it. It sat in my dorm-room fridge, covered with a layer of orange congealed fat, a memory of sunnier times that never seemed to go well with the American food at my disposal. In the end I had to throw it away.

Yet I flirted with the other meals at Super Noodle House. I still remember when they came out with their new menu, spiral bound with colour photographs and English text, to replace the inscrutable dog-eared laminated single sheet only available in Chinese. A whole new world opened up. There were too many things to choose from. Double-boiled pigeon soup? Frog congee? Or something tamer — chicken feet? But no matter how much I strayed — and mostly with the lunchtime dim sum tray, to which I never could say no — I always returned to the roast duck noodles, my one true love.

There might be better roast duck noodles in KL. I’m sure there are. I’m sure you can give me any number of examples, and then, being Malaysians, we will quibble about it for hours. In fact I cannot tell you what was so good about the roast duck noodles at Super Noodle House. The bones were often chopped into awkward spikes, from which the flesh would refuse to detach. The accompanying soup in the bowl was salty dishwater. You always ran out of vegetables before you ran out of noodles. They were not perfect, they might not even have been super, but to me they were the very definition of what roast duck noodles should be. And nowhere in my Bukit Bintang ‘hood can I find anything to replace them.

Behind the chap fan in front of Low Yat: cheap and edible, but the ambience grungy and too quiet. In the basement of Lot 10: far too many claggy noodles, not enough vegetables, and too expensive. In the food court of Pavilion: I couldn’t make myself order them, they just seemed so soulless. At the new Duck King Express, in a feng shui-challenged corner of the Pavilion food court: expensive, uninteresting and very very slow. So much for express.

But while I was waiting at Duck King without any crispy prawn sambal to distract me, I noticed one of the waitresses. Thick-ankled, sensible-shoed, short-haired, face like a side of ham, as Americans might say. She used to work at Super Noodle House. There she was, in this glittering, marble-and-glass, jumped-up pretender to a great culinary institution, but at least she was still doing the same thing.

“Dry one or soup?”

“Dry one.”

One of the charms of Super Noodle House was its work staff. One of them always seemed to be heavily pregnant, wading wide-legged through the narrow aisles. They yelled, and charged around, and booted me to and fro as I was waiting next to the front counter for my takeaway. They were extraordinarily quick and efficient — they had to be, with the line of customers forming outside the door. Even when the noisy side extension was built, there were never enough tables. Super Noodle House was a great place to eat by myself. No one ever looked twice at you or had time for inane small talk. They just fed you, then kicked you out.

But it was not just about cheap and cheerful eats. Outside lunch hours, walking past its window of dripping roast meat, there was always half a suckling pig strung up on a hook, reminding you of where food comes from. “I was but recently a wriggling oinker, just like you,” the pig would say, fat glistening on its crispy snout, “Memento mori.” And so you would enter Sungei Wang, river of money, bastion of modish materialism, with that reminder of what really matters in life.

To Malaysians, what really matters is food. For a successful Malaysian shopping centre, Sungei Wang has always been curiously devoid of food, the eating establishments so hidden away as to be almost invisible. Only last week did I discover the answer to a question I have often mulled — where do the spiky-haired delinquent Malay youth who hang out in such numbers in the semicircle in front of Maybank go to eat? Answer: in the Malay food court on the fourth floor of Sungei Wang. Didn’t know Sungei Wang had a fourth floor? Neither did I.

Now there’s the new side wing on the way to Giant supermarket, with its fancy kopitiam and always-empty Japanese places and random donut shops. We’ll see how long those last. Because it’s a revolving door for restaurants in Sungei Wang. That was something else that made Super Noodle House so special. There it was, right out front, in yer face, and so noisy, so crowded, so extraordinarily skilled in dishing out great food at great prices and great speed, that you were certain it could never go out of style.

Until suddenly it did.