Mu Du Noodles

SFR's 2010/2011 Restaurant of the Year!

After you have eaten often enough at Mu Du Noodles—enough that you are lightly perfumed in daikon, jicama dusts your shirt collars and “martabak” has become casual vocabulary—Mu Jing Lau herself is likely to drop into a chair beside you, uninvited, wrapped in a well-soiled apron and exhaling loudly.

She will not be entirely composed, but more like an athlete just pulled off the field; she will be slowly breathing out the furious work of the restaurant’s small kitchen. Her hair may be in a headband or just recently let loose, each strand suddenly following its own desire.

This is because, like the rest of her kitchen staff, she has been working her ass off.

Do not be surprised if, at this point, she nods at your dish, looks you in the eye and asks what you think. She won’t be searching for compliments; she will be genuinely curious. You might be eating something she’s had on the menu since 1997 when Mu Du Noodles opened—the Malaysian laksa or the jade brown rice, for example—but that does not preclude the possibility that, just for the hell of it, she fussed with the recipe that night, wondering what would happen if…? And now she wants your honest opinion.

This is because Mu is restless.

The consistent inventiveness of her many daily specials—usually, but not necessarily, following the same general pan-Asian sensibilities on which the primary offerings are built—is evidence enough of her failure to be content with having mastered one of the most versatile and consistently delicious menus in town. But she is always up to something…more.

In the fall of 2009, the restaurant served dim sum-style brunch on Sunday mornings. Eaters lucky enough to have attended one of these brunches were met with a kaleidoscopic array of small plates, one after another, relentless and unending, like a tiny, mouthwatering, edible zombie army. There may not be another chef in town with the chutzpah to confidently toss a spare plate of wildly sticky chicken feet in front of unsuspecting, somewhat timid diners and expect them to be beside themselves with glee (which they are, as soon as they get their hands dirty).

During the summer of 2010, Mu switched things up and instead served Asian tapas (and whatever other tapas she felt like) on Sunday nights. The plates were constantly shifting from week to week, and the preparation and ingredients for return dishes were always open to experimentation and always drawn from, like the rest of the menu at Mu Du Noodles, local, seasonal meats and produce. It drove her kitchen staff insane, she says, but she was as giddy as a little girl making cakes of mud and grasshoppers in a toy oven.

Tapas were served in a newly opened room of the restaurant—a sake bar featuring abominably good imports distributed by Santa Fe’s Floating World—with a kind of anti-recession esprit also shown by other SFR favorites that recently expanded, including Il Piatto and 315. Although Mu and manager Murphy O’Brian have opted to give the staff a respite from tapas night for now, the new room, exuding a different character, remains open, and the restaurant continues to serve on Sundays with an expanded menu of special appetizers.

O’Brian, whose management and impeccable hosting ensure the service and eating experience match the excellence of the food, says he doesn’t know what wild experiment Mu will come up with next to scratch her restless itch, titillate Santa Fe diners and throw her staff into happy, hard-working confusion.

“But there’ll be something,” he says with both resignation and a smile.

This is why we love Mu Du Noodles.