New for Mid-Autumn Festival: Mooncakes and Pairing Cocktails at Noodle & Beer…
Mid-Autumn Festival is creeping up, and Noodle & Beer, the Sichuan spice regulars in Chinatown and Spitalfields, has decided the answer is cocktails built specifically to match mooncakes. Dine-in from Tuesday 1 September to 25 September, at both sites.
Three sweet mooncake flavours, custard, chocolate, and matcha, each get their own drink instead of being left to fend for themselves next to a random old fashioned. The Matcha Made in Heaven (Don Q Reserva 7 rum, coconut milk, matcha tea, cacao) goes with the matcha; the Strawberry Velvet (same rum, cacao, strawberry, coconut milk) with the chocolate; and the Full Moon Whisky Sour (Toki whisky, yuzu, lemon, sugar) with the custard, which is doing most of the heavy lifting here, since a whisky sour will make almost anything look sophisticated by association. All three cocktails are new for this menu, not fished out of the usual list and given a seasonal rename.
The regular Sichuan menu carries on regardless: chicken, beef jerky, and courgette fries with lemon pepper and Persian spice, for anyone who'd rather treat the mooncakes as dessert than build a whole evening around them.
Then there's the actual gift, the Deluxe Mooncake Gift Set (£75): chunky red bean, chestnut, Taiwan pineapple, and firewood black sesame, arriving with a Longquan celadon cup, a bamboo lantern stand, and a card, so at least someone's thought about the unwrapping. It's a shop item rather than a dine-in one; pre-orders open in August via noodleandbeer.com, with nationwide shipping or branch pickup from late August, sent out in the order they land. Suitable for vegetarians; does contain gluten, milk, egg, soy, nuts, and sesame, so check the label if any of that matters at your table.
We haven't been yet; when we have, you'll get the real verdict, not this one. For now: dine-in runs to 25 September, and the gift sets are pre-order only while they last.
Booking/ordering: noodleandbeer.com