Feng Ying Guilin Rice Noodle

Opened in May 2026, Santa Ana’s Feng Ying Guilin Rice Noodle (also stylized FengYing) specializes in a recipe from South China that you’ll find breathlessly touted online as “famous,” “legendary,” and “over 2,000 years old” – Guilin noodles from the province of Guangxi. The concept pairs rounded, medium-thickness rice noodles with a small portion of light brown meat stock and soy-based sauce, proteins of your choice, and sour vegetables, then gives you access to a set of additional toppings to customize the flavor and texture to your liking.

Half of Feng Ying’s single-page, double-sided menu offers varied toppings for this dry noodle dish, ranging from a $10 vegetarian version to a $20 “house special” with six different proteins. The other half offers soups pairing the same basic ingredients with pickled cabbage, at prices from $11 to $18 based on proteins; most entrees are $15 or $16 with a single choice of meat. Several cold appetizers ($8 to $12) include cucumber salad, tofu with pepper or chilis, century eggs, and two sliced beef options.

Offering seating for roughly 30 people in a space near Costa Mesa’s Ikea and Kaiser Permanente’s Harbor-MacArthur offices, Feng Ying turns out to be the third location of a small San Gabriel Valley-based chain that has added one restaurant each year since opening in 2024. In Santa Ana, Feng Ying chose a corner shop at the somewhat anonymous Harbor Promenade Shopping Center, which is also home to fine dining establishment Darkroom, Tommy Pastrami New York Delicatessen, and Vietnamese restaurant Nguyen’s Kitchen. Even by its neighbors’ widely varied standards, the service model here is somewhat minimalistic – guests seat themselves, and may or may not be greeted by a server when they arrive. A smartphone/QR code-based service system handles orders; on our visit, the “order placed” chime roused both Feng Ying’s lone cook and single server to reappear in the otherwise empty space.

Next to the cash register, there’s a “free condiment bar” with peanuts, toasted soybeans, chili sauces, garlic, green onions, cilantro, vinegar, and oil. Rather than bringing our bowls of dry noodles and soup to our table, our server handed them off at the bar with instructions to customize them before eating anything. Guests are expected to add some chili, garlic, onions, and cilantro at a minimum with dry noodles, and probably augment the soup with cilantro and onions; Feng Ying leaves you to select your preferred heat and vinegar levels, as well as how much crispy texture want to add with the nuts and soybeans.

Interestingly, the condiment bar advertises the ability to achieve five levels of heat across “garlic chili” (5-pepper), “black bean chili” (4-pepper), “special roasted chili” (2-pepper), and “chili oil with red oil” (1-pepper) options, though it’s not instantly obvious how to assemble each of them from the mostly unmarked condiment bins. As only three contain chilis – one jalapeno, one red chili, one chili oil – first-time guests will need server assistance to replicate those recipes.

We tried three items on our visit. To sample appetizers, we chose the “spicy” version of Feng Ying’s otherwise plain-sauced beef ($12), thinking that we might need something to tide us over while waiting for the lone cook to assemble our entrees. To see what the online Guilin noodle hype was about, we selected the house special dry rice noodles with crispy pork, pork intestine, snails, beef, beef ribs, sausage, and sour bamboo shoots ($20), covering most of the menu’s protein options (besides chicken). And since we also wanted to see what the soups were like, we ordered the Liuzhou snail meat rice noodles soup with pork intestines and sour bamboo shoots ($18); a small bowl of plain broth with green onions also arrived for free. Everything came out fairly quickly, partially because the place was empty when we arrived, but also because the dry noodle and soup bowls turned out to be easy to prepare and substantially similar in ingredients.