#mifen

Mifen101 specializes in rice noodle soup from the Guizhou Province of China. That type of cuisine is known for being sour and spicy. They like their vinegar.

The menu included cold dishes (appetizers), noodle soup, dumplings, and hotpot. The noodle soup can be customized by adding extra veggies, extra meat or extra sour & spicy flavor.

Beef offal mifen ($13.99): Asked for extra spicy and it was very tame. I added hot sauce and it still wasn’t spicy. Surprising because that area is known for pretty spicy food. The noodle soup looked nice and had a variety of textures including onion, cilantro, green onion, tripe, tendon, pickled cabbage, rice noodles and a spiced beefy broth. The round rice noodles were soft. The pickled cabbage was sour and crunchy. There was plenty of tripe and tendon and both were tender. The broth was beefy and slightly sour; the spices were interesting. There seemed to be a bit of a powdered soup taste though and it wasn’t served hot enough.

Seaweed salad ($7.99): Cut into thin strips, served with peanuts. My father said it was too salty.

No receipt was provided. They asked us to pay cash because the credit card machine wasn’t working. Would have been nice to have been told that before we ate. Service was friendly. Portions were generous.

The décor is minimal with big freezers in the hallway and a giant TV still in the box in the dining area. It’s a small place with a maximum capacity of 26 people.

3.5 out of 5 stars

One of the main products of the shopping spree that resulted in the stuffed fridge I posted a picture of a few days ago was a large large batch of chao mifen, one of my favorite things to eat. It's a combination of mifen (a thin rice noodle), pork, mushrooms, carrots, and cabbage.

What you need:

1 package of mifen (very important: make sure it's mifen and not vermicelli or fensi, which is a mistake I've made several times. They do not cook the same way at all. The Wai Wai brand is a good one.)

  1 pork tenderloin

  1 pack of shiitake mushrooms (I managed to get fresh ones!)

  3-4 medium sized carrots (I don't really like carrots, so I just used 2 short fat ones. They add a nice color to the dish :) )

  1/2 Chinese cabbage

  soy sauce

rice wine

oil

white pepper powder

sa-cha sauce (If you don't know what this is, see image here)

black vinegar

sugar

The Process:

1. Prepare your mifen by soaking it in water. After a while, it will become soft (as you can see below).

  2. While you're waiting for your mifen, prep your other materials! All your ingredients should be cut into pieces that are roughly the same size, because it looks better that way. Also, it cooks more evenly too.

Cut your pork tenderloin into small strips and then marinate in rice wine and soy sauce:

Grate your carrots:

Slice the mushrooms (I removed the stems first):  

Then slice up the cabbage:

If this looks like a lot of food to you... it was. I ended up doing it in 3 batches because it was so much more than my pot/spatula could handle. In any case, now all of the ingredients are prepared, and the stir-frying can begin!

Pour a little bit of oil in and when it gets hot, add in the marinated pork. Stir-fry until cooked.

Tilt your pan so that the juices collect on one side, and push the pork to the other side. Add in some water and soy sauce, and then toss in your mushrooms, carrots, and cabbage.

  Once you get everything cooking, add in the mifen. Stir so that everything gets distributed evenly, and do a taste test to make sure there's enough flavor, adding soy sauce, salt, and white pepper powder to taste.

Repeat for all batches and you will get a giant tub of chao mifen like this:

Now comes my favorite part: the sauce. I found out recently that most people don't do this, so maybe this is just a family thing. But it's one of my favorite sauces ever, so you should try it! Stir together equal parts of sa cha sauce and black vinegar, and then add sugar to taste. It'll look something like this:

I'm guessing that you could just pour it in and coat your mifen, but I like keeping a bowl on the side, so people can add in as much or as little as they like. Once you have your desired amount of sauce, just stir it in and enjoy! :)