Often with domestic attempts to popularize or synthesize Asian cuisines, one taste predominates: sweetness. To his credit, Bill Kim doesn’t try to lure babies with candy at his upscale neighborhood noodle joint Urban Belly. Instead he offers an array of pan-Asian-inspired dumplings and rice and noodle bowls with bold but occasionally wearying flavors. It’s a quick-serve, sometimes frenzied communal setting that by early indications is a winning business model. The dumplings alone could carry it; offered in five distinctive varieties, they’re tasty across the board. I particularly liked the ones stuffed with lamb and brandy, fragrant pork and cilantro, and duck with pho spices. But my excitement was quickly dampened by the other menu categories, particularly the greasy rice bowls—long-grain rice topped with a few small slabs of short rib, or tossed with pork belly and pineapple, pea shoots and basil, or a combination of all of the above. The noodles have a tendency to taste strikingly delicious in the first few slurps, but gradually exhaust the palate the closer you get to the bottom of the bowl. This is especially true of the saltier varieties—the rice cakes in Korean chile broth with katsu-style chicken breast, for instance, or the stir-fried egg noodles, which while nicely knotted and crispy were bathed in a broth not all that different. The gluey soba with bay scallops in blue crab broth was an unmitigated disaster, but I did feel favorably toward the ramen, a chewy tangle with shiitake and thick slabs of pork belly. There’s a lot to like in these bowls—bonito flakes, Kim’s springy house-made fish cakes, the bitter Chinese broccoli that offsets the sweet chile-lime broth in the udon, the one entry that could be considered cloying. But they rarely add up to the sum of their parts. For the most illustrative indicator of Urban Belly’s relative value, look to the sides—the eggplant with Thai basil is terrific, as is Kim’s pungent house-made kimchi. But nearly every other restaurant in town that serves kimchi serves it for free, as much as you want—it’s inexpensive and easy to make. Kim’s is good, but it’s not $4-for-a-tiny-saucerful good. —Mike Sula
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