Joe's Noodle House

A week ago Saturday, as I was returning from my hike in the Catoctin Mountains along I-270, it occurred to me that I was passing through Rockville, MD, and therefore close to Joe's Noodle House. It was almost lunchtime, and since I am hardly ever up in those parts these days, stopping to pick up some food from Joe's was a no-brainer.

Joe's is one of a handful of truly authentic Chinese restaurants in the area, the kind of food you would not normally find outside of major cities' Chinatowns, if that, and every meal I have ever had there was spectacularly good. The problem is that it is very small, and befitting a restaurant of its quality, is usually packed, so much so that the line is literally out the door. On this occasion, however, it was early enough for it to be relatively uncrowded, and in any case, I was planning to get my food to go (something I rarely do) and eat it at home. After perusing the menu for a few minutes, I settled on Szechuan Dry Beef Saute. "Have you ever head it?" the owner, who usually takes orders at the cash register, asked. "No," I replied, "but I've had something similar elsewhere," referring to a delicious, and very spicy, Szechuan beef dish I've had at TemptAsian Cafe (a topic for another entry). "It's the spiciest dish we make," she told me, and described its ingredents -- whole red chile pods, lots of black pepper, and other spices, used to season dry, jerky-like beef, carrots and celery. "It's designed to numb your tongue," she concluded. "Would you like us to tone it down a little?" I contemplated, but only for a second. "No, I'd like to have the authentic version," I replied resolutely.

As the lunch crowd was slow to arrive for some reason, the owner, whose name I didn't know but who was unfailingly friendly and pleasant and spoke excellent English, chatted a bit, mostly about running (I was wearing a t-shirt I had received at a 10K race I ran a couple of years ago). About ten minutes later, the food was ready, I thanked her again, and sped home to have lunch.

I pride myself on not only being able to eat, but actually enjoying, extremely spicy food. Only once in my life have I been served a meal that I thought was too hot. It was at a Thai restaurant in Tempe, AZ, many years ago. I suppose I should have expected this from a Thai restaurant that moved into a space formerly occupied by a Western-themed steakhouse and did not change a single element of the original decor. Even then, however, I could, and did, eat the food I ordered. I merely thought that had it been a little less hot, the flavors would have come through better, and I could have saved the waiter the trouble of constantly having to refill my water glass. Joe's was on an entirely different level. It was without a doubt the hottest thing I have ever tasted, by several orders of magnitude. I ate about a third of the very generous portion, and in the process drank a beer (nothing like a good cold beer after a long hike in the heat) and about half a gallon of water. Joe's certainly believed in truth in advertising -- my tongue was decidedly numb. Most of the the impact, I believe, was made by the way the red chiles were used. They were whole, with tops still intact, and therefore their seeds still inside, and they appeared to be thrown into the wok dry, without being soaked beforehand. Many of the brittle pods then cracked open, spilling the seeds, which contain lethal amounts of capsacin, the substance that makes hot peppers hot, into the rest of the ingredients.

Here is the amazing thing, though: it was absolutely delicious. There was so much complex flavor that it cut right through the heat, intense though that was. The black pepper flavor was obvious, along with some citrusy sourness and some other mysterious, fragrant, almost cinammony spice. The beef was crunchy and tender at the same time, complemented nicely by the plentiful carrot, celery and onion. The overall effect was overpoweringly intense, but one of the most delicious things I've had in a long time. As I was finishing the meal, reeling from the sensory overload it provided, it occurred to me that this was the authentic version of the saucy, flabby, and, if you're lucky, very slightly tingle-inducing dish most Chinese-American restaurants call "Szechuan Beef."