After reading about The Noodle Box on GastroFork’s blog and how one dish on the menu was Dee’s favorite item, I knew it was something to put on my list of places to try. The Noodle Box is a Canadian chain with a couple of locations in the Vancouver area as well as on Vancouver Island. For my visit I hit up the Homer Street location. I really loved how one of the founders of the company hails from Campbell River, BC and the story of how they got things started really struck me. They specialize in South East Asian dishes but tamed down for the masses, for me it’s all about the food so if it tastes great and the quality is good authenticity can take a back seat.

This is the dish I had to try, the Spicy Peanut Noodle Box. You get your choice of protein or tofu if you want, I went with chicken and it came in at $13. It had peanut sauce, peppers, Asian greens, roasted peanuts, cilantro and green onions garnished with bean sprouts, on ribbon noodles.  I really love peanut sauce and noodle dishes so this was a winner for me.  The peanut sauce had a nice depth of flavor and the other ingredients in the bowl went great together.  Also the sauce had a nice thickness to it.  The lime was a great hit of citrus to cut the richness of the dish.

The one thing that struck me with this was the size of the bowl-it was a good amount of food for $13.  The chicken was in nice big chunks and each piece was tender and moist.  One of the things that I would have changed was the type of noodle, the ribbon type noodle while great for this type of sauce were hard for me to eat with chopsticks.  The other thing that I noticed from my visit and Dee’s Kitsilano location visit was the amount of sauce used, her’s seemed really balanced and mine was on the over sauced side.

My first experience at The Noodle Box was a good one overall and I’ll be back to have this again but with a different type of noodle or rice, also a few of the other dishes I saw on the menu looked pretty good.