Munch: FJ Noodles and Dumplings

A feed for fuck-all

FJ Noodles and Dumplings

What: Northern Chinese and buffet-style

Price: $15.50

When: pretty much always (10:00am—1:00am on Sunday–Thursday, & till 5:00am on Friday & Saturday)

It’s definitely got heft, but hard to enjoy. 

⭐⭐

As another Red Rain Warning rolled over the city and I finished packing another load of nonsense into a cardboard box, it was clear that tonight was going to call for a bowl of easy and plenty. Enter stage left, FJ Noodles and Dumplings. A dip into Reddit and Google Reviews suggests that this is a place most frequented in the early hours of the morning, after a long pilgrimage through a series of licensed establishments (I’d only ever passed by FJ before today, which shows how much I get out). 

FJ Noodles’ buffet menu is their obvious claim to fame—number one rated on their Uber Eats menu, with twice as many reviews as anything else, and a perfect deal for me to check out. They offer three different-sized containers: a small or medium rectangular container for $13.50 or $15.50, or a deep bowl for $17.50. These will get you a base of either egg fried rice or noodles, with the option of one, two, or three toppings, respectively. It’s a bit of a game—Papa’s Chinese Takeaway—as the lady behind the counter carries your container across and ladles on the toppings that you pick out, but it’s much harder to put together a harmonious bowl of food. 

Ordering for myself and my partner, I ended up getting one bowl of Vegetable [&] Tofu, Egg Foo Young, and Sweet Sour Pork on rice, and a medium container of Curry Chicken and Spicy Pork on noodles. Worse results could have been possible from my panicked pointing at the cabinet, but anything with a sauce like the Curry Chicken should really go over rice to be soaked up, and the sweet-sour pork would have melded better with the Spicy Pork than the sweet-sour-egg-and-tofu amalgam that I ended up with. Props to the woman serving for not skimping; you walk away with a plastic brick of sustenance that all blends into one discordant takeaway symphony; an oil slick of flavours on rice. 

Of course, a buffet comes with inevitable food safety suspicions, which the average person’s immune system will chew up and spit out—but if you’re immunocompromised or someone who should be wary of allergen cross-contamination, you’d be forgiven for giving this a miss. I’m loath to dwell too long on the subject of food hygiene just because it’s front-of-house here and not a knife used for chicken and beef in a kitchen out back, but I bring it up because it is tied to my first impressions of the food. 

The Spicy Pork, for start, was tough and dried-out from the hot lamps. Kind of fun to eat, I must admit—like a jerky with a dusty fried batter, but tired and bland. On the other hand, the chicken in the curry sauce had been slow-cooking for hours and was very tender. Off-puttingly so. Some pieces were skin-on and slippery, halfway to a gelatin state, which, on undercooked noodles, was not appealing. The gravy itself did this dish no favours either, missing any tomato-acidity or spice. 

The vegetarian options were by far my favourites. The Vegetable and tofu was a lot of broccoli, but this had held its crunch instead of going limp, and the florets had soaked up lots of soy and oil. The Foo Young and the fried rice ended up blended into a great savoury mix, with plenty of shrimp paste, sweet cubes of pea and carrot, and chunks of fluffy omelette. Quite an oily fried rice, but very scoffable. 

This is a meal I would recommend only on the basis of value, and even then with hesitancy. The medium container is a good meal for $15.50, while the bowl for $17.50 will leave you full. Definitely undercutting any other meal of that mass in town, but pick wisely. However, I don’t think this review is an indictment on FJ as a whole. 

It might just be that the buffet by the door is what keeps the place in business, while a whole other calibre of cooking happens in the back kitchen. Nick Iles of the Spinoff published a profusely apologetic ode to FJ Noodles after sitting down and trying their hand-pulled lāmiàn noodles. Made to order and served with bright and dynamic sauces, they sound like works of art. Pushing $20 or more, they are a touch outside of Munch’s budget, but I’m looking forward to walking past the buffet cabinet to try them—off-the-clock—sometime. 

Am I talking shit? Do you wildly disagree, or want to feed my ego by telling me I’m so right? Or have I overlooked a place so far that readers really need to know about? Send me something to chew on at: guy@salient.org.nz.