d Bowleda gBeautiful Oakland’s Noodle Belly mixes ingredients and influences BY Jeffrey Edalatpour
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PHOTOS BY JOSH FELISE
n his primary day job, Eugene Lee owns a roofing supply company. It’s not the first profession that comes to mind when I try the food at Noodle Belly. The concept is straightforward: Choose a vegetable and a protein to accompany a bowl of noodles and the housemade sauce. One can, for example, combine fried chicken and roasted carrots or barbecue pork belly and sauteed rainbow chard. The chewy noodles are plentiful, and as thick as chopsticks. The secret sauce tastes sweeter than a typical barbecue glaze, complementing—rather than overpowering—one’s chosen combination of vegetable and meat. Jorge Concha is the chef executing a shared vision with Lee and his business partner Kevyn Miyata. Lee describes the food at Noodle Belly as “Bay Area
comfort food.” Lee says he’s Korean American, Miyata is Japanese American via Hawaii and Concha is Peruvian American. “I can’t call the food Asian, because it’s not really Asian,” Lee says. It’s not Peruvian either. “It just has influences from all of our backgrounds.” Lee and Miyata had been toying with a concept like Noodle Belly for nearly a decade. They only began to take the idea seriously, to hone and define it, in the last couple of years. Hiring Concha sealed the deal. With Concha’s background in fine dining and the Mr. Lomo Peruvian pop-up, Lee believes he was “the perfect candidate” for the job. The Bay Area, Lee feels, has its own culinary identity that differs from New York. “We have our own idea of how ingredients should be treated,” he says. “We call it comfort food because this
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