Calling all NBA players, cavemen and other people with large hands: A new restaurant in Berkeley invites you to literally grab all the meat you can eat.
DH Noodles and Grill opened late this spring at 2475 Telegraph Ave., a couple blocks away from the hungry hordes of UC Berkeley. Its specialty is the cuisine of Northwestern China — specifically, Gansu province, whose cities of Dunhuang and Lanzhou are known for bold, hot flavors that make the brow sweat. Diners can expect vast bowls of long-simmered beef soup, chilled-and-spicy vegetable appetizers and some of the longest hand-pulled noodles available in the Bay Area.
DH Noodles adds to the Northern Chinese-rich foodie environment of northern Telegraph Ave. It is a block away from Ox 9 Lanzhou Handpulled Noodles, which also opened this year, and the popular soup joint Noodle Dynasty.
The thing that gets DH Noodles on the all-powerful Instagram radar is its “Meat Lovers” beef-noodle soup ($33), which presents the kitchen’s flavorful bone broth along with a bowl brimming with beef slices. Diners are then invited (wearing gloves) to do a one-handed snatch of the meat. Writes one admiring customer on social media: “This one is fun AND yummy because you get one chance to grab as much beef as you can!!! One try only, okay!” Another comments, wisely: “I’m tryna get enough meat to last a week.”
The restaurant DH Noodles and Grill opened in 2026, serving Northern Chinese cuisine in Berkeley, Calif. (John Metcalfe/Bay Area News Group)
Apart from this gimmick, DH Noodles is a rather standard but elevated source for Northern Chinese eats. The cold appetizers pair the crunchy textures of wood-ear fungus or cucumber with a sheen of bright chili oil. (The chili oil here is much better than you might expect, being not too spicy but deeply aromatic and earthy.) Hot appetizers include scallion pancakes with fillings like braised pork and barbecue lamb, served sliced like savory crepes, and “hamburgers” that are actually buns stuffed with meat and browned on the grill.
Crispy lamb chops are served on a wooden cutting board like the finest Texas barbecue ($31). They are spicy, but the kitchen makes its own yogurt-based beverage that diners can imbibe to squelch the fire. There’s a massive lamb hot pot, big enough to share ($39), and under a menu section called “Northwest BBQ” some almost carnival-like dishes like Cheetos-colored flatbreads and a “Tornado Potato” on a stick.
A signature entree is the “Big Plate Chicken” ($28), typically a one-plate meal made from a whole marinated bird carved into pieces and served with peppers and warm spices, accompanied with the restaurant’s wide noodles. Fans of noods will enjoy mixing and matching among the various forms (wide, thin, triangular?) that are pulled to give the perfect, stretchy-bouncy bite. They shine in soups like the Original Lanzhou Beef Noodles ($16) and dry-noodle dishes like the Cumin Lamb and Green Pepper ($19).
Chances are, if you pull on a noodle’s end it will keep on coming out of the soup, like some mystical snake, and slip and fall back in before you can measure the whole thing. They are very long — but as the restaurant’s marketing says, “The road is long. We‘ll meet in Dunhuang.”
Details: Open 11:30 a.m.-9 p.m. daily at 2475 Telegraph Ave., Berkeley; dhnoodlesandgrill.com