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518 Noodle Bar Turns Out One Standout Bite After Another

The Kittery restaurant’s menu is a paradox of choice, so why choose just one dish?

From top: pork-filled tofu-skin rolls; shrimp dumplings; beef ramen.
By Will Grunewald
Photographed by Clayton Simoncic
From our March 2022 issue

In recent memory, the most fun I’ve had with food was when I tried xiaolongbao for the first time. It’s a style of dumpling that originated a couple of centuries ago in Changzhou, China, and has not, as far as I know, made many appearances in Maine since then. The delicate little pockets of dough are filled, improbably, with piping-hot pork soup instead of the usual tight bundle of solid-state meat or vegetable — the trick is using a gelatinized broth, which turns back to liquid when the dumplings are steamed. I knew this, and yet, as I held my first xiaolongbao between two chopsticks and admired its construction, I proceeded to bite it in half, sending soup splattering across the table. Lesson learned: ingest in one piece. I realize the gross (in multiple senses) injustice of this comparison, but upon eating one xiaolongbao correctly, followed by another and another and another, I was reminded of the compulsive childhood pleasure of popping Gushers.

518 Noodle Bar
518 Route 1, Kittery. 207-703-215.
Price Range
Small plates $5–$9. Entrées $13–$15.
Takeout-Only
The dining room is temporarily closed due to the pandemic, but when open, it seats up to 40 people and has a full bar.
Personal Favorite
Chef-owner Bing Zhou’s go-to is the chashu pork ramen, with roasted pork, bok choy, carrots, bean sprouts, and half a soft-boiled egg.

It wouldn’t be a mistake to order a meal only of these and other dumplings and small plates from 518 Noodle Bar, in Kittery. The har gow, steamed shrimp dumplings, are packed so full of meat that a luster of pink shines through the thin wrappers. The pan-fried pork dumplings come with a house-made ginger-soy dipping sauce that I would drink. The tofu-skin roll — a sort of pig in a blanket — was another dish I hadn’t had elsewhere: ground pork mixed with Chinese five spice, ginger, soy sauce, hoisin, and egg, then rolled inside a thin tofu skin and fried until flaky and crisp.

The menu is the creation of Bing Zhou and Xue Zheng, who own the restaurant together with Zhou’s husband, Lyle Brown, a York native. Zhou and Brown met in Shanghai, where she was a nurse and midwife and he was managing English-language schools. After the couple moved to Maine, Zhou befriended Zheng in an English-as-a-second-language class. Zheng’s family ran restaurants back in China, and soon the trio was planning their own. They spent a year building out their kitchen and dining room, in a recently renovated plaza on Route 1. Two months after they opened, the pandemic arrived, and they’ve been doing takeout-only ever since.

None of the food seemed to suffer from the drive home. Beijing noodles — thick noodles dolloped with a slow-cooked sauce of pork, bean paste, ginger, onion, and scallion — feel like a spiritual relative of Italy’s Bolognese, subtly complex and majorly comforting. For their ramen soups, Zhou and Zheng make their own bone broth of pork, beef, and chicken, and they make the noodles from scratch too. Ramen was, of course, popularized in Japan, but its culinary roots are Chinese. And though the menu at 518 Noodle Bar mostly sticks to Chinese preparations, there are a few other instances of fusion. Crab Rangoon, for instance, is a snack of indeterminate provenance that became a staple of American Chinese restaurants, and Zhou and Zheng give it a local twist, subbing in Maine lobster for the crab.

I’m looking forward to, at some unforeseeable point in the future, dining in at 518 Noodle Bar, although by the time I was done eating takeout — six small plates and four entrées, shared two ways (all for under $100, which I found incredible) — so much was left over that I’d have wound up with a stack of to-go containers anyway. The menu is a paradox of choice, so why choose? I ordered far too much food, and I doubt I could ever order any less.

Down East Magazine, March 2024 cover

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