The “Belt noodle Yibin style” at Bixi Beer is one of the best bowls of pasta I’ve eaten all year. I don’t care that it’s a black-market merger of two different regional Chinese noodle dishes; the chewy, wide Shanxi-province biang biang noodles—like steroidal pappardelle—tangle adaptably well amid funky black beans, pickled mustard greens, chopped peanuts, and the electric ma la buzz that together make up the MO of the southeastern Sichuanese dish they’re named for.
Such a sweeping, pancontinental scope—which also references the food of Vietnam, Thailand, Nepal, and Korea—presents real risks on a menu where the same noodles are deployed in a trio of soups including one, a murky, vaguely Korean chicken broth with bok choi, that tends to soften and disintegrate them into mush.
Conversely, restraint seems like it was more thoroughly applied to the beer (and cocktail) lists—the advertised Asian-ish ingredients are barely perceptible even in interesting offerings like the dark, malty Chelonian Lair ale with Sichuan peppercorns, or the Shifties, a Bud-like lager whose promise of puffed jasmine rice fails to materialize, or the Smallmouth Buffalo, a bourbon-based cocktail whose fish-sauce syrup barely registers.
2515 N. Milwaukee 773-904-7361 bixi.beer
