Arlington Is Now Home to Cult-Followed Hand-Pulled Noodles
Watertown's Home Taste just opened a second location on Mass. Ave. in Arlington Heights.
Hand-pulled noodles with cumin, peppers, onions, and lamb at Home Taste in Watertown. / Photograph by Jenna Skutnik for “Top New Restaurants 2016: Found in Boston“
Home Taste, a suburban spot for a micro-regional Chinese cuisine, just opened a second location in Arlington. Home Taste’s Watertown outpost has been a popular stop for chewy hand-pulled noodles, cumin-lamb-scented sandwiches, and more central Chinese specialities since 2015.
Boston Globe food correspondent (and Arlington resident) Kara Baskin first shared the news. Back in June, she reported that Home Taste would expand to take over the former La Posada space in Arlington Heights.
Making hand-pulled noodles is an ancient art that requires precision, copious wheat flour, and time. Greater Boston first got a taste of the tender-chewy tradition when Gene Wu, a native of Xi’an, China, offered his take on the dish at Gene’s Chinese Flatbread Café in Chelmsford. He opened his shop there in 2011, but now has three locations in Woburn, downtown Boston, and Westford. MDM Noodles brought the technique closer to the city in Brighton just a few months before Home Taste opened in Watertown in 2015, Eater Boston has noted. Home Taste, meanwhile, is owned by wife-and-husband duo Ying and Kai Chen, who hail from the central Chinese province Henan.
The Boston magazine food team highlighted Home Taste’s “gems,” like those peppery, stir-fried wheat noodles, in the 2016 Top New Restaurants issue. In a December 2017 review in the Globe, Baskin said the original location is “the type of place to hover over an aromatic bowl of broth and eat as fast as you can, elated that you discovered such a treasure.”
Besides the spicy hot oil-seared hand-pulled ropes, the newest Home Taste also offers bowls with thinner house-made noodles; plus Chinese-style burgers filled with stewed pork or spicy lamb; pan-fried dumplings; Chinese casseroles swimming with wood ear mushrooms and bean curd sheets; and a few authentic appetizers. It’s closed Tuesdays, but open every other day from 11:30 a.m.-9 p.m.
1312 Mass Ave., Arlington, 781-646-8080/781-646-8081; 58 Mt Auburn St., Watertown, 617-923-0227/617-923-6227, hometastema.com.
