At Changshan Rice Noodles, the star of the menu is the Cantonese-style roast duck. The Cupertino restaurant is open until midnight most nights.
The Midnight Diners is a regular collaboration between KQED food editor Luke Tsai and graphic novelist Thien Pham. Follow them each week as they explore the hot pot restaurants, taco carts and 24-hour casino buffets that make up the Bay Area’s after-hours dining scene.
If you’ve ever wondered where all the young Asian Americans in Cupertino hang out late at night, all you need to do is visit the Cupertino Village shopping plaza.
At around 9:15 on a recent Friday night, the entire plaza was positively swarming with Asian teens and twentysomethings. On one side of the parking lot, a swanky hip-hop dance studio and a Mandarin-friendly board game club hosting a Dungeons & Dragons night each attracted their own particular flavor of Asian youth culture. On the other side was one of the longest lines that I’ve ever seen queued up outside a boba shop. (The new Charlie’s Tea was running a buy-one-get-one special for its grand opening, it turns out.)
We’d come in search of a late-night Chinese feast, but what we found wasn’t just one solitary restaurant that happened to stay open late. Instead, the whole shopping center buzzed with youthful energy and excitement.
Our intended destination, Changsha Rice Noodles, aka Changsha Mifen (长沙米粉) — or “Jade Tea BBQ,” according to the restaurant’s only sign in English — stays open until midnight most nights, tucked away on the far end of the busy plaza. It’s part of a crop of newer, semi-mysterious Chinese restaurants in the South Bay that always seem to be in the middle of a rebrand. In Changsha’s case, it seems the folks who run Jade Tea Garden, the Cantonese banquet hall on the other side of the building, decided last fall to try their hand at Hunan-style street noodles. The two restaurants share a big kitchen in the middle — hence the confusing signage and hodgepodge menu combining two regional cuisines that don’t normally have much to do with each other. Certainly it’s the only place I know of that specializes in Hunan rice noodles and Cantonese barbecue.
Also known as “Jade Tea BBQ,” the restaurant is located in the Cupertino Village shopping plaza — a hugely popular late-night hangout spot for young Asian Americans.
My suggestion? They may want to consider renaming the restaurant “Jade Duck House,” because the duck is the one must-order dish — the thing that stands out as soon as you walk in the door. In back, dozens of the birds dangled from metal hooks, some already roasted to a gorgeously well-burnished golden brown. Many more hung in various stages of an air-drying process calibrated to yield the crispiest possible skin.
During our visit, Changsha was running an incredible special — $15 for half a “Guangzhou roast duck” (discounted from $22). This was some of the tastiest Cantonese-style roast duck I’ve had anywhere in the United States. The skin was outrageously crispy without being greasy; the layer of flavorful fat had rendered down to soft, melty nubs. The meat itself? Impossibly tender and juicy. On the plate, a nice little “jus” of sweet soy sauce mixed with the duck’s fatty drippings made for a heavenly dipping sauce.
The duck is so good, all you really need to add is a bowl of white rice to assemble a satisfying meal. But the restaurant’s other specialty — rice noodles prepared in the style associated with Changsha, Hunan’s capital city — is also worth trying. These come in a variety of both soupy and dry versions. We thoroughly enjoyed the restaurant’s solid, flavorful take on beef noodle soup, which came topped with mustard greens and a scattering of raw chopped garlic. A dry version topped with scrambled eggs, pickled mustard stems and chopped chilies had its own homey, rustic kind of charm.
In both dishes, the rice noodles themselves were the most memorable component: round and white like spaghetti and cooked just shy of soggy, but with a pleasant, chewy bite in the center. They were very, very slurpable.
Changsha Rice Noodles is open Monday to Saturday 11 a.m.–2:30 p.m. and 4:30 p.m.–midnight, and Sunday 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. and 4:30–9 p.m. at 10911 N. Wolfe Rd. Ste. B (in the Cupertino Village shopping plaza).