The Cheapest Thing on the Menu- China Tang Lanzhou Beef Noodles

Cost: $17.90

Location: Lot 1D Level 9 Regent Place Shopping Centre, 501 George St Sydney   

What we’re finding with the ‘Cheapest Thing on the Menu’ challenge at sit down restaurants, is that there really isn’t a cheapest thing on the menu at these places, as everything is pretty expensive! At China Tang Lanzhou Beef Noodles located in the Regents Place shopping centre, the starting price for a main is $17.90, which is the cost of most basic dishes on their menu. Which means that we’re not saving any $$$ from this meal, however it also means that I get some choice in what to eat this time! However, since we’re at a restaurant which has the name of their signature dish baked into their shop’s name, it’s pretty hard not to try their signature dish. So, I had their regular Lanzhou Beef Noodles, and when given the choice of noodles, I chose the handmade noodles and the thickest they got!

Portioning: Their serving sizes were pretty large, a decent sized bowl came my way and it was filled with thick hand made noodles! Although they were a bit stingy with the beef though, only 3 slices of meat in mine. As I’m blind, so I just eat what my chopsticks happen to latch upon, so I ate at least half of my bowl before I happened on a piece of meat (yes, it was really that few).   

Tastiness: The soup broth was full of flavour, a little bit spicy but the right level of spicy for a cold Winter’s afternoon. The noodles themselves didn’t have any flavour, nor did the beef, so all the tastiness came courtesy of the soup. And if you were daring enough to use the selection of condiments which were provided at your table, you can enhance the flavour of your dish to your liking- but for me, I never touch the stuff, as who knows how many countless others have used them and who knows what they had done to these bottles.

Quality:  I think with these things, the range of quality is quite narrow, it’s never going to be super bad, while it’s never going to be OMG either! So, it was good, it met my expectations for a dish like this. The soup came out piping hot, so for the first few mouthfuls I was scorching the lining of my mouth trying to get the noodles down, while the hot soup kept cooking the noodles so by the final third of my dish, the noodles were getting pretty soggy by then. While the standard beef used in Lanzhou beef noodles, is that thinly sliced beef, which you can tell came from a nice cut of beef. However, you don’t get much of it.

Value for money: While it was the cheapest thing on the menu, however I wouldn’t say it was particularly cheap at $17.90. For the same amount of noodles, at a Chinatown restaurant, I’m thinking it would be easily under $15 (if I went a non-meat option). But because we’re dining in the heart of the retail hub of the city, we were paying for their rental cost and their location. So, it wasn’t really value for money.

In the end, I think my ‘Cheapest Thing on the Menu’ challenge works better with fast food style restaurants, where table service doesn’t play a part so the menu can have some utterly cheap options on there. When dining in, the floor for the cheapest item on the menu is automatically raised up a notch to cover their fixed costs, so nothing is really “cheap” or “Value for Money”. But from eating from the standard/basic options section of menus, it has surprisingly taken me down memory lane, to my youth 20 – 25 years ago when most restaurants only had standard/classical offerings on their menus, before menus became a little bit fancy and fusion.

So hey, dining in is not really hitting the mark with my ‘Cheapest Thing on the Menu’ challenge, but it does provide me with a point of comparison when comparing one restaurant’s  standard offering to another’s. China Tang Lanzhou Beef Noodles basic dish is in the mid ranges when it comes to serving up a menu staple.