On Sunday, parades, lanterns and brothy cuisine signaled the end of the beginning of the Chinese New Year. Children ran through the streets of Paris’ Chinatown with incense and balloons while inanimate dragons serpentined through the crowds. While hardly as grand as the Chinese New Year festivities that parade through Downtown Los Angeles, participating in this cultural fête made me feel at home. Since that windy Sunday wasn’t going to provide me with any sun, all I needed to continue feeling at home was some steaming hot Chinese food. So into Chez Van I went, where bowls of homemade noodles and cakes awaited me.
Because everything, from the broths to the sundry noodles, at Chez Van is made in-house, the small restaurant is heralded as one of the best cheap, Chinese eateries in Paris. The restaurant has an airy brightness dissimilar from most bustling Chinese restaurants I’ve experienced.
A lunchtime meal at Chez Van includes multiple plates that steadily arrive one after another. Though Parisians are known to extend meals into long durations, a typical Chinese meal is characterized by a similar tendency to linger over successive plates.
In addition to its noodles, Chez Van is known for its mini-galettes. These Chinese cakes oozed with a salty broth that kept the flavorful ground beef and scallions moist and tender inside the gelatinous pastry. Each bite contained varied textures of crunchy meat, chewy crust, and oily broth.
With a filling similar to the mini-galettes, the dumplings differed little in flavor. Nonetheless, the steamed dumpling wrappers created an entirely novel experience. The beautifully slimy exterior melded into the ground beef so cohesively that the meat took on an entirely new dimension of moist tenderness.
The first set of noodles were thick and cooked so that they withheld some body. The sweet sauce overwhelmed the flavors of the seafood, but I’m sure that the small shrimp and squid were not fresh in the first place. As the seafood and noodles were cooked perfectly, the textures of the dish excited me, though the flavors seemed to miss the mark. With the only noticeable flavor being sugar, this certainly was the most “Westernized” of the dishes in the Parisian Chinese restaurant.
Despite the saucy disappointment, Chez Van picked itself back up with its signature broths. Fresh vegetables, succulent pieces of beef, and a piquant stock encircled thin, al dente noodles in this refreshing soup. The dish was spicy and hot, just want an American girl, cold in the Parisian weather, needed.
Open Tuesdays through Sundays for lunch from 12 to 3pm and dinner from 6:30 to 11pm, Chez Van can be found just down the street of Les Gobelins at 65, boulevard Saint-Marcel.
Eating [Paris] Layer by Layer 