Noodle Tuesday: Eagle Noodle Factory for sale

From left: Eagle's Japanese-style saimin and regular saimin

Eagle Noodle Factory, the 33-year-old noodle shop that supplies two of the oldest saimin restaurants in town—Palace Saimin and The Old Saimin House—is for sale. Palace uses Eagle’s Japanese saimin, slightly alkaline noodles which cook up into slippery and chewy strands. According to owner Miriam Lee, Eagle is the only place in town that makes these noodles—the recipe handed down to her by another saimin factory down the street that closed years ago.

Cake noodles drying inside Eagle Noodle Factory

The recipe is in danger of being lost—Hong Kong-born Lee and her husband are retiring and selling the factory which they built in 1993, after moving from their original location in Chinatown. Included in the sale: all the noodle-making equipment; training and recipes for all Eagle's products like chow mein, saimin, e-mein and various dumpling wrappers; plus import and export licenses (Eagle also sells their cake noodles to San Francisco stores). The whole package doesn't come cheap: asking price is $1.36 million. Also attached is a four bedroom and two bath living space—perhaps it's not quite the live/work loft you've always envisioned, but in addition to perks like all the noodles you can eat, Nanding’s Bakery and its famous Spanish rolls are right next door on Gulick Street.

The factory remains open for business (and is still fulfilling all its accounts across the Islands), so you can continue to pick up fresh noodles and perhaps see Lee, after 33 years of living and breathing noodles, still sitting down for noodles for lunch.

Eagle Noodle Factory, 916 Gulick Ave., 845-2555, open Monday through Saturday from 6 a.m. to 5 p.m.