Fried Noodles with Superior Soy Sauce 豉油皇炒面
Fried Noodles with Superior Soy Sauce is featured among the local specialties of Hong Kong.
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Fried Noodles with Superior Soy Sauce (豉油皇炒面) is a Hong Kong stir-fry of thin noodles seasoned mainly with soy sauce. It turns up in Cantonese restaurants (酒楼), cha chaan teng cafes (茶餐厅), dai pai dong street stalls (大牌档) and congee shops, and needs only a few ingredients and a quick method.
How it is made
The usual method starts by frying lengths of spring onion until fragrant, then mixing light soy sauce, dark soy sauce, salt, sugar, sesame oil, chicken powder and water into the 'soy sauce king' (豉油皇) seasoning. Thin noodles go into the wok with this sauce, followed by shreds of garlic chives, bean sprouts and carrot. There is no fixed list of vegetables; two or three kinds cut into fine strips is typical. Bean sprouts give off water in the wok, so restaurant chefs add them last, or fry them first and toss them back in near the end, to keep the noodles from going soft.
Oriental Daily (东方日报) described in 2012 how Fuyao Restaurant (富瑶酒家) in Tsim Sha Tsui (尖沙咀) makes its version with its own egg noodles, plump bean sprouts and yellow chives. The noodles are soaked in cold water, dipped in water at about 80°C for five to ten seconds and left to air-dry for three hours. In the wok they are loosened with chopsticks instead of a spatula so that neither noodles nor sprouts break, and the soy sauce is added a little at a time for colour.
Flavour and texture
The Oriental Daily food columnist's test of a good plate is that the noodles are dry rather than oily, taste strongly of egg and soy sauce, and leave no oil on the plate.
How it is eaten
In fast-food restaurants and congee shops the noodles usually carry only chives, bean sprouts or other shredded vegetables and seldom meat, so the dish is sometimes treated as vegetarian, and it is seen as a filling staple of cha chaan teng and fast-food menus. The same columnist counts plain congee, fried noodles and fried dough sticks (油炸鬼) as the three staples of Chinese breakfast and late-night eating.
Where it comes from
The owner of Fuyao, which opened in 1976, told the paper that fried noodles became very popular from the 1970s. Because well-off diners did not like to eat at dai pai dong, the restaurant reworked and upgraded the everyday fried noodles so that they could enjoy them too, and over time the dish became its signature.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-24. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.