Thin Wheat Line: V Bar Noodles With Fried Chicken

Noodle: House special noodles (with egg noodles)

Source: V-Bar Noodle Bar and Lounge, 2122 Second Ave., 441-8227, vbarseattle.com. Open for lunch, dinner, and late night.

Price: $9.

V-Bar may be the swankest noodle house in Seattle, with mood lighting (imagine!), a full cocktail bar, and regular club nights. Jeff Pham and Trish Le took over Saito's Sushi in July when Yutako and Anita Saito decided to sell their place (Nancy Leson reported at the time that the latter couple plans to open a smaller, higher-end Japanese restaurant). V-Bar's menu is nominally focused on Hong Kong noodles, and bursts of Cantonese conversation fly out the kitchen door, but the food segues into Southeast Asian fare with dishes like papaya salad and garlic chicken wings. Better yet, V-Bar serves food until 4 a.m. on weekends. That's after Dick's closes, dude.

I'm thinking the noodles are as much Vietnamese-Chinese as they are Hong Kong style, since the house special noodle soup tastes much like the one at Mi La Cay -- a clear, light chicken broth, a few lettuce leaves, slices of roast pork, a whole fried-chicken thigh, and a fried wonton containing a whole (headless but shell-on) prawn. The mat of skinny, wavy wheat noodles at the bottom of the bowl start out a little hard, but after a minute or two in the soak, they relax and loosen up. Fried shallots speckle the surface of the soup, adding a nutty note when one floats into your spoon, but otherwise the broth tastes a little watery and the roast pork is nothing great. A scoop of ground chiles and a dash of chile-spiked vinegar markedly improve the flavor.

The best part, not surprisingly, is the fried chicken thigh, whose skin stays crisp in the soup much longer than you have any right to expect. Noodles and fried chicken. At 4 a.m. Four. A. M. Repeat this a few times until you know you'll be able to recall it after a night out at Shorty's.