Embarking on my crawl of Freeport Boulevard, I started last month with a visit to Taste of Original. For my next stop, I popped into yet another nondescript strip mall to hit up another regional Chinese restaurant, Old Gui Lin.
Whereas Taste of Original serves up traditional Cantonese dishes, Old Gui Lin serves the food of its namesake, Guilin, in the Guangxi region of China. The city is famous for its dramatic limestone peaks, and for its noodles. The noodles in this case are rice noodles, and fairly thick ones at that — not vermicelli.
The diminutive restaurant is about as no-nonsense inside as out. The walls are adorned with images of Guilin, accompanied by text explaining the history and technique of the dish, as well as the owners’ love for it. Or so I learned thanks to Google Translate, as I don’t speak or read Cantonese…