Did I ever get tired of them?

There are so many different noodles that one can view eating them as going out for Italian one night and Mexican the next. Maybe one day, I’m feeling a Shaanxi kind of mood, and the next, I’m down for some Lanzhou fried noodles. But this rabbit hole goes WAY deeper than that. A bog-standard bowl of beef noodles will vary widely from province to province and all the way down to the village level. Individual families have their own twists on classic dishes that get passed down through the generations.

I’ve got a lot of bowls under my belt.

This print and the graphics below are a continuation of a blog post I wrote back in 2018, which was the culmination of many years of firsthand noodle experience in mainland China. It wasn’t until recently when I discovered a bowl of authentic Chongqing beef noodles in my hometown that nearly made me weep (and not just from the authentically generous use of spice), that I decided to revisit that post for some design inspiration.

Apart from creating a fun design that celebrates something I love, I wanted to highlight just how different noodles are from each other in China. It’s too easy to write them off as a monolithic dish when the noodles themselves are so easily distinguishable by shape, size, color, and the grain used to make the dough. Each of the five I chose is region-specific but common enough that you can enjoy them anywhere in China.

Noodles look good in a bowl and on T-shirts.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been captivated by a dish abroad and felt the need to create a minimalist print for my shop so it would stop itching my brain. I used Illustrator and my trusty Wacom tablet to weave a vector tapestry of the different strands of noodles, with the toppings overlapping and underlying the types of noodles they’re usually paired with. You can find the print on anything from wall art to aprons in my Redbubble shop!