My friend Julia has traveled around the world, but I was shocked to hear that she never really liked spicy food until she encountered the noodles in China’s Yunnan province. After a few bowls, she was sweating, but hooked. Back in New York, the specialty isn’t easy to find, which is why she was set on taking me to a place she’d read about in New York magazine’s Cheap Eats issue.

We got off the D train at Fort Hamilton Parkway in Sunset Park, a neighborhood I had never even heard of before. It definitely wasn’t one of those that get cited as the new front of gentrification in the outer boroughs. It was a Sunday, and although the station at Coney Island had been bustling, the strip of stores under the elevated train tracks were mostly shuttered, and all quiet. It didn’t look at all like the place to find an oasis of regional Chinese flavor. There was a “dairy restaurant,” where kosher keepers needn’t worry about milk meeting meat; a Polish deli; and here and there, an Orthodox guy trudging along stoically in the heat, swathed in a heavy black overcoat.

And then, just a few blocks over, the neighborhood shifted. There was a boba shop, a Vietnamese restaurant where we stopped for sodas as we tried to regain our appetites for an early lunch, and a bunch of Chinese restaurants. And tucked away just off the main drag, Yunnan Flavour.

I don’t think this photo really conveys how tiny this place is unless I tell you that the entire width of the restaurant is marked by the two windows flanking the door. That’s it. Counter seating runs along the windows and down the left side, but half a dozen seated customers would make it feel pretty crowded.

If you come to Yunnan Flavour Snack, you’re pretty much there for noodles. The questions are, what kind (wheat or rice) and in what soup or sauce. Rice noodles with coconut skin sounded exciting, but it turned out there was no coconut skin that day. A young woman sitting at the side counter chimed in as we wondered about the menu options to recommend the pork stew, so I got that with rice noodles.

The stew turned out to be more like a soup, with a light but intense broth that reminded me of the headily spicy stuff at Dandan’s Guilin Rice Noodle in Monterey Park, minus the medicinal hit of Sichuan peppercorns. Here, the heat came from dollops of chile paste, and the herbal freshness from cilantro. The fat rimming the small pieces of pork was so tender, I didn’t even have to think about chewing it. The bucatini-thick noodles, on the other hand, offered just the right degree of chewiness. This was a fantastic bowl of noodles, and if this shop were just a little bit smaller, I’d have put it in my pocket to bring home to California.
Yunnan Flavour Snack Shop
775A 49th Street
Brooklyn, NY
(718) 633-3090