Xi’an Famous Foods

Ever get a yen for a cold, spicy salad made with…lamb face? Chances are you haven’t, but once you’ve had this and some of the other unusual offerings at the new Xi’an Famous Foods on St. Mark’s place, you may start to crave it.

A welcome addition to a street that’s already rife with Asian food places, Xi’an Famous Foods ups the ante by upping the spice content, a lot. One bite of cold buckwheat noodles ($5, item A3), above, and you may start to cry – for a good reason. The amount of fresh horseradish is intense, counterbalanced by cilantro, bean sprouts and sesame oil. As with the fat, hand-pulled noodles that go into many of the dishes here, the buckwheat noodles are made fresh every day.

That “Spicy & Tingly Lamb Face Salad” ($8.75, item E3), meanwhile, comes in a silky, cool broth that adds a bass note of umami to the super-tender chunks of curried, cumin-inflected lamb, basically the beef cheeks of Xi’an’s cuisine. The salad itself is a crunchy mix of celery, zucchini slivers, more bean sprouts and more cilantro. You don’t often see lamb and cumin in Chinese food, but you do here because Xi’an in western China sits on the ancient trade route between China and the Middle East, where Middle Eastern ingredients met Chinese technique.

If this sounds like the kind of place Anthony Bourdain would patronize, he has – the Flushing, Queens branch. But don’t come to Xi’an on St. Mark’s expecting fancy digs: there are only a few seats and stiff competition for them. This is basically a take-out shop where “plating” involves various Styrofoam containers. (The dishes in the photos are mine.) Though it looks like a fast-food joint, Xi’an makes everything with care, so expect to wait 20 minutes while a staff of three people moves, well, as fast as three people can serve a crowd.

All in all this an excellent addition to the neighborhood, providing an anchor of authenticity among the faux-Asian places that have plagued the NYU area for years. Hopefully other local Chinese places, some of which, like Grand Sichuan, have gone down in quality recently, will get the message: Make it fresh, authentic and spicy.

Xi’an Famous Foods
81 St. Mark’s Place, between First and Second Avenues
xianfoods.com