Hello friends! I am quite the noodle enthusiast and I would like to believe that I have converted Grayson into one too. We’ve been having lots of family dinners lately so we haven’t been able to try anything new in the Chinese noodle world until a couple of days ago when we went to Xiang Yuan Qiao. Xiang Yuan Qiao offers cross-bridge noodles from the Yunan province of China. The cross bridge noodles here are served in a burning hot stone pot to keep it hot throughout your meal.
Xiang Yuan Qiao has three locations. They have one in Richmond, one in the food court at Crystal mall and one in Coquitlam. They opened in 2010 and have been growing strong since!
Cross bridge noodles menu
Their menu offers mostly rice noodles but they do have a few rice dishes to choose from as well if that is more to your liking. They offer one version called cross bridge rice noodle where they give you boiling hot soup and you add in all the ingredients yourself or you can order it pre-made. The version where you get to put everything in yourself comes at a higher price point but it is a cool experience to have if it is your first visit. We decided to order one of each so we could compare the two.
After we made our order, we headed over to the condiment station. Here you can make your own sauce to mix in with your noodles. There are a variety of items to choose from including green onions, cilantro, minced garlic, pepper oil, chili oil, black vinegar, soy sauce and sesame oil.
Beef brisket rice noodle pot
This came with a chicken broth base and the beef brisket only made it all the more flavorful. For $10.95, Grayson definitely didn’t think that there would be as much brisket that there was so he was pleasantly surprised. The rice noodles were nice and smooth but still had a bite to them. Even though Grayson likes everything to be packed with flavor, he said that the soup had enough on it’s own already. Another thing we noticed was the the soup stayed piping hot our entire visit because of the clay pot!
Fish cross bridge noodles
We decided to go with this one because we already got noodles with beef as a protein. This came with a huge tray of assorted items to put into the pot of soup.
There was 2 pieces of raw fish, minced meat, mushrooms, spam, pickled cabbage, corn, dried tofu, bamboo shoots, pea shoots, bacon, chives, carrots, cucumber, white fungus, wood ear mushroom, and a quail egg.
Our soup came shortly after we received our ingredients. At first the soup was still at a rolling boil but it quickly came to a stop.
We weren’t really sure what ingredients to put into the soup first so we were glad to have seen that they had instructions on the side of the platter. We followed the instructions exactly but the cabbage, spam, and mushrooms definitely didn’t fully cook. In the end we actually transferred the food into the beef brisket pot because it was hotter than this one. The fish was passable but to be safe, we put it in the other pot too.
In the end we had something like this! yes there is quite a bit of green onions and cilantro and chives on top but that’s just because I’m a little obsessed with greenery on my food. The soup base was the same as the beef brisket pot and the only difference was the soup temperature.
Quick bites:
- So fun to be able to make the sauces for your noodles
- The cross bridge noodle pots have fun toppings but the soup gets cold quick
- Will be back again! We were both stuffed by the end of this meal even though it didn’t seem like a lot at first!