Andrew Chui is delightfully diplomatic when he describes the dish I’m swooning over at his family’s 166-year-old Hong Kong restaurant—fried rice noodles with beef and broccoli. He calls it “soy Western food.” A subject his family is fairly expert on.

For five generations they’ve been serving Western-style Chinese food at their Tai Ping Koon Restaurant in the island’s Kowloon district. Some customers’ families have been dining here for just as long. And longevity is something valued here. Most of his head cooks have worked for the family 30 years or more.

That day, I taste multiple dishes, but the one that stays with me is those fried rice noodles with beef and broccoli. Wide, gently chewy noodles that have sopped up richness from a duo of soy sauces—light and sweet—as well as fish sauce, Shaoxing wine, rice vinegar and sugar. It’s potently savory-sweet.

But the term sauce might be misleading. Because by the time cook Tsang Ying Kwan got the dish onto the plate—and we’re talking mere minutes—there is little sauce to be seen. Trust me, this is good. The sauce by then has been absorbed by the noodles and paper-thin trips of beef, all of it cooking blindingly fast. The result is a delicious tangle of beef and noodles flavored to their core and wrapped around long stalks of broccoli.

Many of the recipes on Chui’s menu go back generations. I don’t know if this one is among those to date back to his great-great grandfather’s days. But whatever its age, it has stood the test of time.

JM Hirsch

J.M. Hirsch is a James Beard Award-winning food and travel writer and editorial director of Christopher Kimball's Milk Street. He is the former national food editor for The Associated Press and has written six books, including “Freezer Door Cocktails: 75 Cocktails That Are Ready When You Are.”