South Africa’s best noodles? These 13 Joburg spots make a very strong case

I’ve developed a few admittedly unscientific signs that a restaurant is probably going to be good, and Shaanxi Noodle House ticks an impressive number of them.

For starters, it’s hidden away in an Edenvale strip between the Pleasure Palace, your one-stop shop for lotions, lingerie and lube, and a cannabis store called The High Table. There’s no English name on the storefront, no English menu and the tables come equipped with tissues, soy sauce, MSG and jars of house-made chilli oil.

The characters on the sign translate to Shaanxi Noodle House, placing the food firmly in one of China’s great noodle regions.

Shaanxi’s capital, Xi’an, was an important point on the ancient Silk Road, and the region’s food reflects centuries of movement between China and Central Asia. Wheat is hugely important, as are noodles, beef, lamb, vinegar, garlic, chilli and spices such as cumin.

The beef noodle bowl here arrives looking far more threatening than it actually is. The chilli oil is beautifully fragrant rather than aggressively hot, the broth is deep and beefy, cabbage brings a little sweetness and the thick hand-pulled noodles have that wonderful chew that makes fresh wheat noodles so satisfying.

This is exactly the sort of place that makes exploring Joburg’s food scene so rewarding. Bring your phone for Google Lens if you need some help navigating the menu, and remember that this is first and foremost a neighbourhood restaurant serving its community, so arrive respectfully and hungry.

Order: Hand-pulled beef noodles with chilli oil
Find it: 67 Van Riebeeck Avenue, Edenvale

There is a lot going on in Qinyuan’s Sichuan-style spicy pork noodle soup.

Wide handmade noodles sit in a rich pork broth with chilli oil and Sichuan peppercorn, giving you heat, fragrance and that unmistakable mouth-tingling sensation synonymous with the cuisine. Pickled greens, coriander and spring onion provide some freshness, while an egg softens everything slightly.

The noodles themselves are the star for me: thick enough to have a proper bite and wonderfully bouncy in the way only fresh noodles seem to be.

If Sichuan flavours are your thing, this is a very good bowl to know about.

Order: Sichuan-style spicy pork noodle soup
Find it: Rivonia Central, Rivonia

Cosmic Café is one of those Rivonia restaurants you could easily walk straight past, which would be a mistake.

There isn’t much ceremony about the place, nor does the food seem particularly concerned with being fashionable or photogenic. Ask what noodle dish is available, order it, add some of the house-made pork dumplings and investigate the chilli oils on the table.

It’s unfussy, satisfying food and another example of why some of the most interesting eating in Johannesburg happens in restaurants that make very little effort to announce themselves.

Order: Ask which noodle dish is available and add the pork dumplings
Find it: 373 Rivonia Boulevard, Edenburg

Despite the name, there is nothing particularly boring about the Taiwanese beef noodle soup here.

It’s one of Taiwan’s great comfort foods: a dark, red-braised broth with thick wheat noodles and tender pieces of beef, backed by the warmth of ingredients like soy, ginger, garlic and star anise.

Bok choy, spring onion and pickled mustard greens help cut through the richness.

It is deep, warming and substantial without becoming overwhelmingly heavy, and on a properly cold Johannesburg day I can think of few better things to have sitting in front of you.

Order: Taiwanese beef noodle soup
Find it: 24 9th Avenue, Edenburg, Rivonia

Swallows Inn deserves a place on this list for reasons that extend beyond what’s in the bowl.

The restaurant sits on Commissioner Street in Johannesburg’s original Chinatown and is widely regarded as one of South Africa’s oldest surviving Chinese restaurants.

The combination noodle soup is wonderfully straightforward: flat noodles with chicken, beef, seafood and vegetables all sharing one generous bowl.

Come hungry, but also take a moment to appreciate where you are. Restaurants form part of the living history of cities, and Swallows Inn offers a glimpse into a Johannesburg that many people know very little about.

Order: Combination noodle soup
Find it: 6 Commissioner Street, Ferreirasdorp

Tea and Antique was one of the restaurants that first sent me properly down this noodle rabbit hole.

Run by husband-and-wife team Nini and Jonsen, the restaurant introduced me to Shaanxi-style biang biang noodles: huge belt-like strips of wheat dough, stretched by hand and slapped against the work surface before being dressed with garlic, spring onion, soy, vinegar and sizzling chilli oil.

The noodles are thick, chewy, gloriously irregular and almost purpose-built to carry sauce.

For anybody whose understanding of Chinese noodles still begins and ends with chow mein, this is a very good place to broaden the definition.

Order: Biang biang or Shaanxi noodles
Find it: 11 Park Street, Bedfordview

Northeastern China gets properly cold, and its food often makes perfect sense when viewed through that lens.

At this tiny Rivonia restaurant, thick handmade wheat noodles arrive with a dark, garlicky sauce, deep-red chilli oil, tender slow-cooked beef, fresh chilli and coriander.

It’s rich, warming and deeply comforting.

This is also one of those places that reinforces an important rule of eating around Rivonia: never assume that the small, relatively anonymous restaurant you’ve walked past a hundred times has nothing interesting happening inside it.

Order: Handmade beef noodles with chilli oil
Find it: Corner Rivonia Boulevard and 9th Avenue, Rivonia

There is something reassuringly direct about a restaurant called One Bowl of Noodles.

My pick is the spicy pork noodle soup, with diced pork, spring onion and bok choy in an aromatic chilli broth.

The chicken fried noodles are also excellent, tossed with sesame oil, soy, egg and vegetables, which creates the obvious problem of deciding which one to order.

My solution has generally been to take somebody with me and order both.

Order: Spicy pork noodles
Find it: Rivonia Central, corner Rivonia Boulevard and 9th Avenue

Athena and Charlie have managed something clever at Chopstix: regional Chinese food that feels approachable without having its personality stripped away in the process.

The beef flank soup noodles are an excellent example.

Handmade noodles sit beneath tender beef flank and a slow-cooked broth with onions, carrots and Chinese spices. It’s deep, familiar and comforting, while still offering something very different from the Chinese restaurant dishes many South Africans grew up eating.

For anyone beginning to explore further into regional Chinese cooking, Chopstix makes for a very easy entry point.

Order: Beef flank soup noodles
Find it: 75 4th Avenue, Melville

It would be very difficult to write about noodles in Johannesburg without including PRON.

Emma Chen built the Linden restaurant around the northern Chinese food she grew up eating, from a part of China where wheat plays a much bigger role than rice.

That means handmade noodles and dumplings, along with plenty of garlic, spring onion, coriander, chilli and Sichuan pepper.

For this particular list, I’d head towards the Sichuan chilli chicken noodles, although PRON is best experienced with enough people around the table to justify ordering several dishes and sharing everything.

For many Johannesburg diners, it was one of the restaurants that first demonstrated just how much Chinese food existed beyond the familiar South African takeaway menu.

Order: Sichuan chilli chicken noodles
Find it: 69 7th Street, Linden

Beijing Opera is small, personal and unlike most of the other restaurants on this list.

Its cooking draws on southern Chinese, Hakka and Teochew traditions, with dishes made from scratch and a menu that changes depending on what is being prepared.

This isn’t necessarily somewhere to arrive with one specific dish in mind. Find out what is being served, ask questions and let the kitchen guide you.

There are excellent dumplings, rich broths and food that feels deeply connected to the people cooking it.

It’s less about working your way through a giant restaurant menu and more about eating what somebody genuinely wants to feed you.

Order: Ask which noodle dish is currently being served
Find it: 98 Conrad Drive, Blairgowrie

Shaxian food comes from Fujian and has grown into one of China’s great everyday food traditions, based around affordable noodles, wontons, soups and snacks.

The noodle bowl I tried was completely different from almost everything else on this list.

Prawns, cabbage, seaweed and wood-ear mushrooms arrived with noodles in a silky peanut-and-sesame broth. It was savoury, nutty and almost creamy, but surprisingly light to eat.

If you want a single dish that demonstrates why talking about “Chinese food” as though it is one cuisine makes very little sense, put this alongside the cumin-heavy Xinjiang noodles further down this list. They could hardly be more different.

Order: Noodles in peanut-and-sesame broth
Find it: Rivonia Junction Shopping Centre, Rivonia

Xinjiang sits in China’s far northwest, where centuries of trade and migration along the Silk Road and the region’s proximity to Central Asia have helped produce a food culture distinctly different from much of eastern China.

Lamb and mutton feature heavily, as do cumin, chilli, tomatoes, peppers, onions and hand-pulled wheat noodles.

The cumin stir-fried mutton noodles here bring all of those things together.

The noodles are thick and chewy, the mutton deeply savoury and the cumin gives the entire dish that unmistakable warm, earthy perfume. It’s one of the most distinctive plates on this list and one of my favourite examples of just how varied Chinese noodle culture can be.

Order: Cumin stir-fried mutton with hand-pulled noodles
Find it: 21B Hettie Street, Cyrildene