Eating Like a Queen for $6.50

Our friends at the Las Vegas Weekly just came out with their list of Vegas’ Best, and I’d eaten at all the restaurants that made the list minus one: Noodle Palace in Chinatown. That’s yet another unoriginal name for a restaurant. Perhaps they need to hire a copywriter? But I digress.

Noodle Palace won the “best place to eat under $10” category, and in times like these, that’s fantastic. We all generally know that eating at small, ethnic restaurants can be much more cost-effective than eating at their American-style counterparts, but this deal seemed too good to be true. With the Las Vegas Weekly in town, we set out for Chinatown.

Noodle Palace is located in Chinatown (Spring Mountain Road between Decatur and Lindell), in the same small plaza as one of my other favorites, Hue Thai Sandwiches, next to a less-than-legit-looking massage place and a Latin American imports place with an apostrophe atrocity in its name (Vegas Import’s). The place is spotless and simple, well lit with a semi-open kitchen.

Service is speedy and friendly, with two very efficient waitresses running the place. I told our server about the honor the restaurant had just won, but she seemed unimpressed, or perhaps it was a language barrier. I ordered the won ton soup that I had come for – a total of $6.50. I was amazed when it showed up on our table, in a huge bowl that looked more like a soup pot that you would get at a Thai place. They brought two soup bowls for us to share. The well-seasoned broth was full of noodles and almost ten shrimp dumplings, which were delicious and fresh. This dish alone could have fed both the very hungry husband and I. His eyes were bigger than his stomach, and he went for the dim sum plate (we declined the offer of adding chicken feet to the platter), which was a meal in itself. The ribs were particularly outstanding, as were the yeasty dumplings filled with meat.

Finally, we ordered the salt and pepper pork chops. We were envisioning one pork chop, but instead, we were served an enormous plate with pieces of pork chop that had been breaded and deep-fried and salted. They were crispy, delicious, and had just the right amount of salt – think French fries, only much, much better. The extensive menu includes mainly dishes for less than $10, including family combination dinners for two or more diners.

For a grand total of $21.98 excluding tip, our entire table was covered in food and we took at least one meal home. The green tea is on the house. For the convenience of non-Chinese speakers, the menu is in both Chinese and English (no pictures, though).