Huangtan Rice Noodles 黄潭米粉
Huangtan Rice Noodles is featured among the local specialties of Hubei.
Photo adjustments
Full frame retained; EXIF orientation normalized, proportionally resized to at most 800 pixels and converted to WebP. No generated pixels or subject changes. Cards may crop the display.
Huangtan Rice Noodles (黄潭米粉) are hair-thin white rice noodles served in a thick eel soup, from Huangtan Town (黄潭镇) just west of the city of Tianmen (天门) in Hubei. Xinhua puts them at the top of Tianmen people's breakfast choices, and the craft of making them was added to Hubei's seventh provincial intangible cultural heritage list in 2024.
How it is made
The noodles are pressed from locally grown early-season rice. A traditional maker in Yuekou (岳口) starts at 3 a.m.: the soaked rice is ground to a slurry, drained and squeezed into balls, part-cooked in a pot, then forced through a hand press into strands less than a millimetre thick. The strands are boiled, lifted out and kept in clean water. The whole job takes more than twenty steps, and a careless step leaves noodles that will not hold their shape, stick together or fall apart in the pot. Xinhua counts about thirty steps and ten days for a complete bowl, once the soup and the topping are included. Some shops now make the noodles by machine, but one of their owners says the soup of fresh eel allows no shortcuts.
How it is eaten
The noodles are lifted from boiling water into a bowl of thick, browned soup in which eel has been cooked down, and topped with a layer of minced eel. It is a breakfast dish, hot and spicy. Local people add egg, puffed rice, fried dough twists, fried dough sticks or a guokui (锅盔) flatbread, and the crisp pieces soak up the soup. According to Xinhua, the habit is said to come from the four-item "everything as you wish" set served at the Yuyisheng (余义盛) noodle shop in Huangtan.
Where it comes from
An old saying runs "ten li west of Tianmen lies Huangtan Town, rich in rice noodles", and the dish is given an age of about three hundred years. One story credits Yu Wencheng (余文成), a late-Ming migrant from Xianning (咸宁), who opened the Yuyisheng shop in Huangtan. Another says a filial son called Mei created eel rice noodles for his sick mother, who ate them and recovered. Countless shops in Tianmen's urban area and townships now hang out the Huangtan noodle sign, and a local firm now sells a three-minute quick-cook pack.
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.