Grand Street Bait & Tackle ... and Garlic Noodles

The owners of , E. Lum and Larry Evans, have been in business for more than 10 years.

In that time, they moved their business five blocks from their original location, acquired a beer and wine bar, and then lost the bulk of their business when the economy slowed ... which forced them to strip their once-robust menu of everything except spaghetti.

But when they recently came upon an old Fireside Lounge recipe for Esther’s World Famous Garlic Noodles, they played with the ingredients, made it their own, and are slowly making a comeback. 

How did the Esther’s World Famous Garlic Noodles recipe land in your lap? Someone said they had a copy of it and they gave it to me. And then I looked at it, and then Larry looked at it, and then he kind of tinkered around with it. And he just kept tinkering around with it on Sunday afternoons and just gave the guys garlic noodles here for free so that they could taste test it. The guys that come in on Sundays to watch the games, they’re all diehard. They’ve been eating those noodles for 30 years so they would know better than I would whether they were good or bad or right on or whatever.

And now they’re called? Boathouse Garlic Noodles. Yeah, we can’t use somebody else’s name. And this is our recipe anyway because, you know, it’s not the same as the original. 

How long did it take to perfect the recipe? Maybe about two, three weeks. Larry was set on getting it right, so he kept doing it and doing it until the guys said it was right on. A little more here, a little more of this, a little bit more garlic, a little bit more chicken, maybe some more Parmesan, whatever spices, a little more onion powder, a little more butter. 

When Eye on the Bay ran us, we were doing like maybe four to ten orders a day. The day after Eye on the Bay ran us on the TV, we did like 48 orders that day. We’ve been averaging over 10 orders of the noodles now. People have been coming from Fremont, from Castro Valley, from San Leandro. A van drove up once and these people, they’re with their walkers and canes, and they came here for the garlic noodles. So that’s pretty good.

What are your hours? We do most of our business from 3 to 6 p.m. We open around 10 a.m or so, or 11 a.m., and then Larry just gets ready for lunch. And our customers are great, you know. We close early but if they’re here, a lot of them, we kind of stay open a little. We adjust.

What kind of food do you serve? We serve garlic noodles and spaghetti. I mean before, we had a good business. We had turkey sandwiches, roast beef, hot pastrami, clam chowder. We were three deep here for lunch. We had a really good business, but it just fell off when people lost their jobs and the gas prices went up.

Because you figure a week of gas money, a week of lunch money, of eating out, is a tank of gas. And they needed the gas to get to work more than they needed to eat out. We couldn't afford to keep buying food for a while so we just said, you know what, let’s just stop doing food. We scaled it down, scaled it down to the point where we really couldn't do much. It’s a shame, but, hey, it’s the economy. What are you going to do? You can’t fight it. But, we’re hanging tough.

The garlic noodles have spiced business up a bit? Oh yeah, they have. People show up that have driven by here for years and never stopped.

I read some reviews on Yelp and people comment about the nice environment here. These customers here, you can’t beat them. They've been coming here probably at least eight to 10 years. There are about 10 guys that still come here every day. It’s kind of like a boys' club thing, or a men’s club thing. They come in, they buy each other drinks, that’s a good thing. And they’re all local too, they live in Alameda, some of them walk home. Sometimes I have to take them home. I’ve done that a lot, but that’s OK, because they’re drinking and they don’t want to drive. And I say, "You know what? It’s better I take you because if you get thrown in jail I’ll still have all your beers sitting here!"

Look for the Eye on the Bay report on the garlic noodles here ... it starts at four minutes in. And the entire Eye on the Bay report on Alameda— which includes many local businesses and an interview with Alameda's own Rob Ratto — is here.