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You Need to Try These XO Sauce-Tossed Egg Noodles on Commercial Drive

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You Need To Try This is a running archive of all the awesome drinks and delicious dishes we’ve come across over the course of our professional and private lives.

The menu at Commercial Drive’s four month-old Vietnamese street food spot Lunch Lady offers a dish that could mislead diners into expecting something akin to San Francisco’s famous bowls of egg noodles tossed in a lot of butter and a crazy amount of garlic (invented at Thanh Long restaurant in 1971). At Lunch Lady, it’s all about the housemade XO sauce that every noodle wears like a winter coat. Each chewy string is an umami cheat code that tastes decadently of oiled up prawn brains slow cooked in a pot that was somehow constructed entirely out of cured pork. Making it extra stimulating are electrifying hot pepper coins and a shower of parmesan cheese that quickly dissolves into the XO like a cocaine alfredo. For fleeting moments it spasms the soul, with or without the optional 63 degree sous vide egg on top. If this is street food, it’s some street!

Directions
Lunch Lady
Neighbourhood: Commercial Drive
1046 Commercial Dr.
WEBSITE

There are 4 comments

  1. “At Lunch Lady, it’s all about the housemade XO sauce that every noodle wears like a winter coat. Each chewy string is an umami cheat code that tastes decadently of oiled up prawn brains slow cooked in a pot that was somehow constructed entirely out of cured pork. Making it extra stimulating are electrifying hot pepper coins and a shower of parmesan cheese that quickly dissolves into the XO like a cocaine alfredo.”

    This might be the best set of sentences I have ever read. I am sorry no one else has commented sooner to pay the appropriate respect that passage deserves.

  4. This dish (or a more updated variant of it as of last week) had me hunting around town for XO sauce. What a treat this was to try at Lunch Lady, and then again at home this week.

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