"My friends and I were searching for good restaurants that were open on New Year's Day. The original restaurant for pho, that we wanted to go to was not open. Yelp showed that Halmae Noodle had pretty great reviews and they were already open at the time, so we decided to check it out. Our party of 7 got there at around noon and there was maybe one other person/couple dining there. The place isn't very big but we still felt socially distanced since the larger table we were at was on one side of the room, and the rest of the small tables on the other, and those each had partitions in between them. The menu is mainly noodles in soup, with the exception of a few rice dishes and their appetizers. To start, they brought us out each a small cabbage salad with a light ginger dressing, which was a nice start to the meal. They also brought some super fresh banchan which they kept filled of kimchi, kimchi daikon, and this other daikon in some type of sesame oil marinade ? , which I really liked. For appetizers, here is everything we ordered: Fried dumplings these were great. They were crispy but not too oily. You have a choice of beef or chicken and we went with the beef. It comes with 10 per order Seafood pancake pretty good but I don't remember there being whole lot of seafood in there Kimchi pancake I didn't love this one I think the kimchi made it a bit soggy For my main, I had the handmade noodles with fish cake. The broth was great and it was very soothing after a late NYE night. I was afraid it would be too fishy or too dashi like but it was perfect. The noodles were just okay to me but that's because I don't love doughy/chewy noodles. These were thick little square sheets that almost reminded me of the texture of those thick wonton wrappers. By the way, these bowls of noodles are HUGE and are probably enough for two people. My friend got the clam soup and I was amazed at the number of clams she was fishing out of her bowl. We each ordered our own and we all had a full quart container to take home. My husband was the only one who didn't get noodles. He had the kimchi fried rice, and you can't really go wrong with that. Definitely want to come back to try some of their other soups but next time, I'll get the regular noodles. Still, I'm glad Halmae Noodle was our first meal for the New Year."
