Hungry City: Yun Nan Flavour Garden in Sunset Park, Brooklyn Yun Nan Flavour Garden First comes the giant bowl of broth, sallow, glazed with oil and flecked with what looks like soot. Then the waiter, holding a small saucer in one hand, tips in a raw quail egg. This is followed, in quick chopstick strokes, by baby-pink strips of raw ham and hunks of raw Silkie chicken with its black, mottled skin still on; pale patches of tofu skin, bean sprouts and garlic chives; and, finally, rice noodles, long and thick and dumped into the broth all at once, so the liquid bubbles up almost to the lip of the bowl. This dish, this pageant, is guoqiao mixian, or crossing-the-bridge noodles, and Yun Nan Flavour Garden, in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, is one of very few places in New York where you can find it. (The back story: a hundred or so years ago in Yunnan Province, in southwest China, a woman had to cross a bridge every day to bring her husband lunch. Inevitably, the soup she prepared arrived cold - until she figured out that a layer of chicken fat on top would seal in the heat, and that the broth stayed hotter if the other ingredients were added at the last minute.) Rice noodles without broth are soaked through with black vinegar, sugar, soy and chile oil and buried under ground pork and roasted peanuts. Let the soup sit and seethe for a while. The noodles, made in-house, seem to retain bounce and bite no matter how long they cook. The soup itself is almost creamy with fat but intentionally subdued in flavor. You are expected to make your own adjustments: thus the glass jar of chile sauce at every table. Yun Nan Flavour Garden was formerly Yun Nan Flavour Snack, primarily a takeout shop that opened in 2006 on 49th Street just west of Eighth Avenue. This is the heart of Brooklyn's Chinatown, which in population now outstrips Manhattan's. There, the gnomic menu did not stray far beyond noodles. Certain items always seemed to be tantalizingly unavailable. I still wonder about the noodles with coconut skin. Last June, the owner, Side Geng, who came to the United States from Kunming, Yunnan's capital, moved the operation a few blocks over to a proper restaurant space. Now there are two chandeliers, large round tables instead of stools, and a longer menu, whose additions include crossing-the-bridge noodles and a Garden section of non-noodle dishes. Fortunately, the classics remain: rice noodles in lucid soup, with thickets of cilantro and your choice of chewy meat stews - the waiters tend to push beef, the chewiest - or crispy meat sauce; the latter turns out to be tiny nubs of pork cracklings and petals of pig intestine, whose aggressive funk takes over the bowl. Rice noodles without broth, cold and hot at once, are soaked through with black vinegar, sugar, soy and chile oil and buried under ground pork, roasted peanuts and visible and vehement chile pepper. Perfect dumplings with delicate skin and moist, loosely packed pork interiors crowd the surface of a hot and sour "sauce" whose consistency and depth qualify it as soup. Wheat-based noodles and flat rice noodles, or "rice stick," are also available, but they are not house-made and the waiters discourage ordering them. Somehow, however, my table was allowed to try Hot & Sour Sweet Potatoes Piece, a dish categorized under rice noodles but in fact containing skinny, translucent vermicelli made from sweet potato starch. That faint tinge of sweetness was like a giggle in the middle of the broth's chile-vinegar death match. The restaurant has something of a cafeteria feel, with help-yourself tubs of metal spoons and black chopsticks on the tables, which you are likely to share with (friendly) strangers. Glasses of water are served hot, as they would be in China in winter. And the menu is still more snack than garden. Few of the non-noodle dishes were available on my visits other than pickled cucumber; skinny, jade-green tendrils of seaweed that looked ready to slither off the plate; and lu mein, a mound of thinly sliced offal, boiled and cured. Asked about item No. 47, the mysteriously named Triple Red, a waiter replied, "We've never had that." But what was it? I still wonder.