Midtown Lunch

Sometimes it’s a Chinese noodle soup kind of day – as yesterday with it’s clouds and rain was – and it gave me an excuse to check out one of the impressive roster of noodle soups at Ho Yip on Liberty St. (at Trinity Pl.). Yip’s seems to get all of the cheap Chinese noodle soup glory in the Financial District with its two locations, but Ho Yip’s selection blows theirs out of the water. I haven’t sampled the noodle soups from every Chinese hole-in-the-wall in the FiDi, but Ho Yip served me a version with some fabulous wontons.

I’d forgotten how chaotic Ho Yip is during lunch with its three different lines depending on whether you’re getting steam table fare, paying for food from the buffet, or ordering soup or food from another steam table. You just have to plunge right in and do a little jostling.

There are about a dozen kinds of noodle soup to choose from including roast pork, fish cakes salt and pepper chicken, fish balls, seafood beef and two with dumplings. Then you choose egg noodles, mai fun, udon or chow fun and specify any extras you want (more vegetables, meat, etc.). I went with the Hong Kong-style wontons with egg noodles ($5.75).

There wasn’t too much happening in this soup except some greens on top, a mess of the thin egg noodles in the middle, and then five of the wontons on the bottom. I was a little worried when I bit into the first one as it clearly wasn’t the pork I was expecting, and further investigating (aka cutting the others open) showed that some were shrimp and some ground pork. Both were great and I appreciated both the size of them and the fact that they didn’t fall apart in the hot broth. The chicken-based broth is a tad boring so I’d suggest making use of a container of chili oil and perhaps adding some soy sauce too. Still, this was a great noodle soup for the price and I didn’t feel like I was missing out by not heading up to Chinatown.

I know most of you probably head to Ho Yip for the cheap Chinese food from the steam tables, but once the weather gets cold I’d encourage you to give the noodle soups a whirl.

Ho Yip, 110 Liberty St. (at Trinity Place), (212) 349-8286