Cardiff . Cheap Eats . Restaurants in Wales . Uncategorized

QBAO Noodles Bao, Cathays, Cardiff: restaurant review

On April 28, 2024 by The Plate Licked Clean

QBAO, then. Cathays, Cardiff. I sit at the window and think, I see why I’ve seen this place called a ‘hidden gem’.

To be fair, the signs are all there.

There’s the location in Cardiff’s heavily populated student area, cunningly concealed on the junction of two streets with busy footfall.

There’s the eye-catching two-tone lilac paint job.

And of course, there’s the fact it is so popular, especially during term time, that each time I have visited, I’ve been lucky to grab the last seat.

Perhaps the clincher, though, for that sought-after ‘Hidden Gem’ (sorry, drum roll… ‘HIDDEN GEM!!!!’™) status is that QBAO is run and enjoyed mainly by minority ethnic customers.

For every Instagram claim of ‘a hidden gem’, there’s a restaurant where you’re lucky to grab a seat. Thai, Malaysian, Polish, Vietnamese, Yemeni, Ethiopian, Korean: the tin-eared label somehow overlooks the fact such places are often busier than your city’s headline restaurants. Turn up at The South Kitchen on Broadway, or at Butetown’s Kingdom of Sheba at the ‘wrong’ time, or the recently-reviewed North Point Hong Kong café-diner– and see how easy it is to get a table, and act as little community hubs in many cases. Throw in a bilingual menu? HIDDEN GEM MATE.

Wales Online used it of Grangetown’s Lahore Kebabish, where dads queue on Sundays for a family’s worth of tawa roti, achari chicken and channa dal. Gem, it certainly is, its punchy Pakistani spicing representing remarkable value: and credit to them for covering the sort of place they typically overlook. But ‘hidden’, though? From whom, exactly?

Certainly not the people who packed it during recent Iftar buffets, or who visit in such numbers they had to move from a ten-seater to a fifty-odd cover home.

It’s a particularly pernicious trend. To labour the obvious point: just because social media users more used to talking about the bland diet of yet another interchangeable coffee shop, dessert chain or Sunday roast have been oblivious to their existence, doesn’t mean they had languished in the dark. They weren’t desperate for someone with an Instagram account to validate what they do. There’s more than a whiff of ‘Who knew people who don’t look like me could have interesting places to eat? AND run successful businesses! Crazy, right? Whatever next!? Anyway, here’s your Date Night inspo…’ InstaFluff to some of this coverage. It’s tone-deaf at best.

It’s not all tainted in that way. Sometimes, it’s just down to not considering bald facts. Take Newport’s Gem 42. Yes, ‘AA Welsh Restaurant of the Year’ Gem 42: you know the one, reviewed a couple of years ago here. That ‘hidden gem’ with its 3 AA Rosettes.
At least they’re half right with the ‘gem’ bit. Undeterred, I ask for local suggestions on the Skip Fire Formerly Known As Twitter: one suggestion is in the TripAdvisor top 10 for the city. Another is in The Good Food Guide. No, really.

And yes, I have seen it used of Cardiff Market, with its Wikipedia page and its 133 year history and its annual footfall of two million visitors. Yes, that Cardiff Market. It’s no small credit to the many hundreds of thousands who visit each year that they saw through its pesky stealth tactics.

Am I being too harsh? Maybe. I know I used to use it with less thought than I try to now. Equally, I’m sure ‘hidden gems’ exist, in the sense of interesting places to eat which haven’t yet found an audience. After all, this blog has form for covering places overlooked by mainstream local food chatter. I’m just wary of seeing it bandied about without care or consideration. It’s enough to make you sign up for the Cringe Karaoke advertised at Vulcan Lounge.

Let’s hammer the last nail into the lid, even as it threatens to lose all meaning. Amazon Prime recently used ‘Hidden Gems’ to recommend Shawshank Redemption and The Hobbit. Or ‘the Stephen King adaptation voted the all-time viewer favourite on IMDB, and the Tolkien trilogy which grossed just shy of three billion dollars’ as they’re probably known in your house.

Good of them, too, to find room for that underground classic, ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral.’

So, here at QBAO- or QBAO Noodles Bao, in full- sitting in this bright little room with its Hello Kitty decals and handwritten board menu (which differs a little from the printed version) and little pots of silk flowers and ornaments, and once again relieved to have grabbed the last seat, I sit and think, ‘Yep, a definite hidden gem’.

In the kitchen, vast metal pots seethe and woks clash to fill orders from busy tables. Thick strands and nuggets of pork, aromatic with five spice, fill crisp, bready little pitta-like pockets which are a far cry from the familiar gua bao I am legally obliged to describe as ‘pillowy’.

The key word here is ‘crammed’, and you feel it’s that kind of kitchen: generous with portion sizes, keen to send you away full. Mini steamed Xiaolongbao dumplings are plentiful and come with rather a good sweet chilli sauce- ‘A bit different from Nando’s’, laughs my server- on the side.

The Thai chicken satay bao is less successful, sadly. Though the peanut sauce is rich and thick, and the filling plentiful- a whole thigh, beaten out and crumbed- it is lukewarm. Cooked through, but lukewarm. It needed another forty-five seconds in the oil, and it’s a shame.

Far better is the Thai seafood fried rice, a hefty portion, wok hei present and correct in a mixture chunky with fat prawns and curls of squid among the light funk of shrimp paste.

The best things here, after several visits? The noodles. Come here for those. That theme of plenty runs deep, from thick slices of barbecued pork to crispy duck, with a meat-free option in Sichuan-spiced tofu. I choose the flatter noodles over the finer vermicelli in a nicely done clear and aromatic broth. These are deep, sustaining bowls.

What is billed as ‘Hong Kong Ramen’ is more of a clear noodle soup, so if you’re expecting something like the fruits of James Chant’s obsessive quest for perfection at Matsudai, you may be disappointed. (I’m later told that ‘ramen’ is often used in the sense of la mien, or pulled noodles,, with “la mien” also a Chinese name for ramen.)

Ask for your beef Xi’an Biangbiang (£11.80)‘very spicy’ for a jolt. Stir, stir, stir those noodles- stir like you’re bored and fuelling a Facebook feud from the sidelines- and get stuck into a bracing bowlful.

You might not hear a word of English from the tables around you. That’s true of some of my favourite places to eat in Cardiff, but if that bothers you, you know what you can do. QBAO specialises in substantial portions to nourish, and we all need places like that: places we can lose ourselves in big bowls of carby comfort.

‘Bee Happy’ says the rim of my bowl. Well, you probably don’t normally take unsolicited life advice from crockery. But at QBAO, it makes sense. Come here. It just might do the trick, you know. But let’s be careful how we talk about it, eh?

QBAO Noodles Bao, 90 Salisbury Rd, Cardiff CF24 4AE