Noah's Kitchen
Noah Jiang trained at the Sichuan Culinary School in Chengdu and cooked at Alley 41 in Flushing before opening here on his birthday in October 2020. His own pick off the menu is the mapo tofu, made to a hundred-year-old recipe he learned in training.
Why go
Jiang grew up in Chengdu, in an academic family.2 His two sisters took the scholarly route and he went to cooking school instead, apprenticing at 荣乐园 and 蜀风园 before New York.4 He opened this room in the middle of the pandemic and got through it on delivery. We focused on the Chinese community,
he told the Globe. We have a pretty strong Chinese community in Brookline, and I understand their taste.
2 Anna Ing ate here in 2021, when dining rooms were still half shut, and found a kitchen doing the small things on purpose: a metal teapot, plain plates, a room in yellow and red.1
Order this / avoid
- Order: the mapo tofu. It is the chef's own favorite and the recipe came out of his training.2
- Order: the bang bang chicken. Ing and her friend finished it fast and then used the leftover sauce on the rice bowl.1
- Order: the signature beef noodle soup, garbanzo beans on top and all.1
- Avoid: the three braised meats over rice. It came out first and it came out dry.1
What locals & experts say
- Anna Ing, Sampan (May 2021):
The noodles were perfectly chewy, and the braised beef soup impressed my friend, who hails from Taipei, Taiwan.
1
Good to know
- The room is small, and Ing recommended booking even in 2021.1
- Different restaurant: Too Hot, on Eliot Street in Harvard Square, is Jiang's second place and opened in summer 2025. The Globe's write-up of the kung pao and the Yibin noodles belongs there.2
Verdict
could-visit — Noah Jiang cooked at Alley 41 in Flushing and trained at the Sichuan Culinary School in Chengdu, and he built this room for a Brookline Chinese clientele whose taste he says he understands. That is a clear kitchen with a clear audience, and his own pick is the mapo tofu off a recipe he was taught. The evidence stops at one bylined review from 2021, and the site's talk of awards names no body and no year. Somebody eating here now and writing it up is what would move this up.