Meet Xiao Ping, the chef behind Eden Noodles’ excellence

The menu at Eden Noodles is extensive, but well-honed and executed with consistent precision. Behind the offering is a talented, hard-working woman, Eden Noodles co-owner Xiao Ping, also known as Tina 

Tina was raised in a riverside village by the mountains, near the Sichuan city of Leshan. Summers were hot and humid, winters were cold. “It used to snow in winter – but that’s unusual now”, says Tina. Tina’s father worked at a mega hydropower station and his civil servant status would shape Tina’s career trajectory. 

Tina’s mum enjoyed cooking but had a busy working life, so Tina got used to helping in the kitchen from a young age. There weren’t so many restaurants then; Tina’s family ate at home for the most part. Middle school students had two choices in Tina’s day – they could pursue an academic education, or they could opt to enrol in a technical college to learn a trade. Tina, like most in her generation, chose the latter. Because her father’s company (a government agency) was building a hotel in Chengdu and would be needing to hire chefs, Tina opted to major in cooking with the goal of employment in said hotel after studying. The way the system worked at the time, explains Tina, meant that “If you didn’t work for the government, it was very hard to make a decent living”. Securing a job with the State was a huge consideration – as Tina puts it, a government job was “a life guarantee”. 

At Xiaoba Technical School in the early 1990s, Tina learned from experts in their field from all over China, and again, her family’s government connections helped her secure valuable internships in famous Sichuan restaurants. The method of teaching, describes Tina, was to instruct students on the basics, but to leave them to work hard to learn the intricacies. In Tina’s era, it was uncommon for women to undertake culinary training and even less common to pursue a career as a chef.

The quality of culinary training in Sichuan has long been revered. Its name means ‘four rivers’ and the province is one of the biggest rice and crop growing regions in China, producing an abundance of food; a good balance of plant and protein. The rest of China has long looked to Sichuan ingredients as cheap and plentiful. For a long time it was China’s most populous province and has traditionally been a relatively peaceful area, managing to avoid the ravages of warfare. Because of those factors, explains Tina, culinary students were historically drawn to Sichuan from all across China – and as reforms got underway and the country began to open up, from all over the world. When they returned home or travelled on to new pastures, they brought with them the Sichuan cuisine they had mastered. The tradition continues – think of Fuchsia Dunlop, perhaps the most respected non-Chinese expert on Chinese cuisine, the first woman to study at The Sichuan Higher Culinary Institute. 

With Sichuan viewed as the epicentre of Chinese culinary tradition, it’s no wonder that many of the most famous Chinese dishes both within the country and around the world trace their roots to Sichuan – think kung pao chicken, dan dan mian, twice-cooked pork, stir fried green beans, mapo tofu, and hot pot. 

Tina has not stepped away from the demands of the kitchen since she first donned the apron as a teen. After graduating she met her husband Ji Zou in Chengdu, and Tina moved to New Zealand in 1998 followed by her husband. Ji Zou followed soon after and the hardworking couple opened Eden Noodles in 2006. From when she arrived here until 2020 when Covid pulled the shutters down on travel, Tina returned to Sichuan every year to continue to learn things she could add to the menu at Eden Noodles. In a similar vein to the way Tina was taught, she happily shares all her recipes, notably with chefs at the other two licensed branches of Eden Noodles – so every dish you eat at Eden Noodles has Tina’s expertise behind it. But she holds something back, she tells – “I teach the ‘how’, but the ‘why’ is my secret knowledge’. 

Nevertheless, she’s very much still involved with the ‘how’. Every day at 11am she’s masked up, hatted up, and getting busy in the tiny kitchen on Dominion Road. It’s fast and furious work. Orders pile in, online, by phone, and from keen customers stepping up to the door. Tina’s on dan dan duty; baptising fresh noodles in boiling water, spooning out broth, scattering over toppings, her every move from pot to mise to pass and back again having been choreographed over years. Teenage Tina had little choice but to use connections to launch a career, but it has been a combination of talent and grit that she’s called on ever since.

Branches around Auckland, including the original shop Eden Noodles Cafe, 105 Dominion Rd, Mt Eden

WORDS AND IMAGES: Anna King Shahab