Summary: Chinese chain offers soup noodles with a great soup base and decent portion sizes although not a ton of variety (small menu); appetizers are unique but somewhat underwhelming; great effort in service.
Nestled in the corner next to Chatime, Dagu offers a showing of traditional Chinese style rice noodles (kind of like spaghetti; NOT the rice noodle rolls in dim sum places).
It's not a big restaurant so it's more ideal for groups of 1-4. About half the seats were filled on a Tuesday afternoon, but I imagine it would get busier as it gets colder.
We ordered a couple of bowls of noodles and two appetisers. The different options all have fancy names akin to crossing a bridge and such, but we'll say we got the tomato/beef slice and the big beef bone in brisket.
We were given a complimentary plate of nuts and the noodles came out less than ten minutes after we ordered and they were BOILING hot!
What stood out about this was the broth. It was packed with flavour. The beef bone-in brisket came with everything already in. The tomato beef slices came with the soup ingredients on the side including rare beef slices. It had corn, imitation crab meat, fish cakes, and more (see picture). Both soup bases had ground beef in them.
You pour the noodles in separately.
The beef bone in was solid size and they give you gloves to caveman style it! Pretty good but I would have been happier with more meat.
Service was good and unusually keen for a soup noodle restaurant: at least three staff asked us how we were doing or if everything was okay. They spoke to us in Mandarin until we asked for English though.
Appetizers were interesting. Popcorn chicken has a wasabi flavour to it but we didn't see any actual wasabi. The brown sugar sticky rice was unique? They didn't have lamb skewers.