Company keeps Asian restaurants stocked

Take a table at almost any Chinese restaurant in the Rochester area and you will likely be welcomed with a bowl of fried noodles, to be dipped in hot mustard and duck sauce.

There’s a good chance those noodles were made just a few days earlier in the Rochester area’s first and only Chinese noodle factory. Since 1980, West Lake Food Products Inc. on Commerce Drive in Henrietta has been catering to Asian consumers in the Rochester area with pantry staples such as rice, tea and soy sauce as well as fresh produce, tofu and seafood. Walk through an unassuming doorway in the back of the well-stocked storefront, past the live tilapia tank and a kitchen where staffers prepare authentic Chinese lunches, and you’ve entered a little-known realm where 10,000 pounds of fried and fresh noodles, wonton wrappers and egg roll skins are cranked out every month.

Most of West Lake’s yield is sold to Chinese restaurants in the Rochester and Buffalo markets, with the remainder purchased by West Lake’s retail customers.

The fried noodles are made from an eggless white noodle that is deep-fried after it is cut. About a year ago, the company responded to customer demand and began selling fresh noodles made from the same dough in three different widths.

„People love this noodle, especially those from Northern China, where noodles are extremely popular. People in outhern China are more accustomed to eating rice,“ explains bookkeeper Penny Tsang.

The other noodle West Lake makes is a medium-wide, lo mein-style egg noodle that is ideal for stir-fries.

The wonton wrappers are made with flour, egg, water and egg powder for color, while the egg roll wrappers contain very little egg.

Each product starts in a mammoth mixer that churns high-gluten wheat flour and liquid into a dough, then kneads it to the proper consistency.

Metals bucketfuls of dough are dumped by succession onto a rolling mechanism of two stainless steel cylinders that flatten the dough by degrees.

The dough is rolled back and forth, back and forth, with workers anchoring each end, folding the dough neatly as it grows longer, thinner and more satiny. Corn starch is sprinkled to keep the sheet from sticking.

„This is the old-fashioned way of doing it. There are new machines that make the noodles without touching them, but the noodles aren’t as good,“ explains West Lake president and co-owner Gee Sing Wong.

The square white egg roll skins and yellow wonton wrappers are cut by hand using metal templates and a large knife. Noodle dough is run through a cutter. A large, covered deep fryer turns chilled, fresh noodles into curly golden crisps.

Noodlemaking changes according to the season, with winter and summer being the most challenging times, says West Lake’s noodle chief and co-owner Chun Lai, speaking through Tsang’s translation. Extreme swings in temperature and humidity make noodle dough more finicky, and water levels must be adjusted accordingly.

Wong, a native of southern China, first came to the United States in 1960 to work in the restaurant business. In 1972 he started his wholesale food and noodle business in New York City and would truck products here to western New York.

But he found that fresh noodles, a highly perishable product, didn’t always survive the trip in top form, especially in summer months. So he and his partners built the Henrietta facility. (For a while, Wong also operated a noodle factory in Houston.)

Shanghai Restaurant has been relying on West Lake’s fried and fresh noodles ever since it opened 30 years ago. „The fresh noodles cook faster and taste better,“ says Shanghai owner Julie Sun.

The Henrietta restaurant’s noodle soups featuring West Lake’s white noodles have become increasingly popular in recent years, especially among non-Asians, says Sun.

Customers are extremely attached to the fried noodles, so much so that they’ve rejected Shanghai’s attempts to replace them with pickled vegetables, as is now the trend among New York City’s Chinatown restaurants, where fried noodles first became popular, Sun adds.

„People say ‘We want crunchy noodles.'“

Source: democratandchronicle.com