Secret recipe for legendary noodle salad at renowned Macon restaurant revealed
Editor’s note: This article is part of an occasional series — “Middle Georgia Delicacies” — bite-size homages to fine food offerings, from the unsung to the iconic, at eateries across our region.
The treasured secret to making the renowned noodle salad at Tokyo Alley is so simple, and yet so tricky to master, that even the longtime restaurateur who runs the place can’t always properly prepare a batch herself.
Saranya Kusawadee opened the popular, tucked-away eatery on Mulberry Street Lane in 1992.
She and her brother, Ed, had worked at the Yamato restaurant on Riverside Drive before venturing out on their own. With them, they took the closely-guarded cold-noodle recipe, an angel hair-meets-celery-and-mayonnaise-laced delicacy that they have since perfected and made their own.
Patrons from as far away as Atlanta have been known to have the dish delivered by courier.
Taylor Peacock, a former Tokyo Alley manager and a friend of Kusawadee’s, says the noodles speak for themselves.
“There’d never really been any noodle (dishes) around Macon,” Peacock says. “Then she pops up and all of a sudden you’ve got these noodles and they’re great. You’ve got to get them. And now 30 years later, people are still trying to get them. The same people. And that staying power, there’s a lot to be said about that in a small town, or a large town for that matter.”
It has been more than a quarter-century since a food-page columnist for The Telegraph, in 1997, first wrote of and lauded Kusawadee’s most enchanting menu item:
If you’ve ever eaten at Tokyo Alley, the chances are good you’ve tried the noodle salad. The recipe is like the Golden Fleece. People have tried for years to get it. ... It’s one of the great mysteries of Macon.
There have been guesses galore from regular patrons about what the ingredients are. Some swear it contains a splash of rice wine or vinegar. (It does not.)
Kusawadee is asked for the recipe on a daily basis. The ingredients are almost certainly in your kitchen pantry, she says. “I tell people all the time, ‘Salt and pepper, sugar, mayonnaise.’ It’s got to be Hellmann’s.”
There is also chopped celery mixed in. (Add fine bits of onion if you want the dish’s original flavor.) And don’t forget fat, twin sliced tomatoes on top.
“We used to put onion in, but we stopped,” Kusawadee says. “You know why? People would say, ‘Can you pick the onions off the noodles?’ Really? So we did away with onions.”
The salad is light and creamy with a hint of peppery zing. The dish may look like spaghetti, but is not exactly slurpable. It is served chilled.
Talking to a reporter on a recent afternoon, Kusawadee sips from a glass of wine in her restaurant, a low-lit hideaway of a dining sanctuary between bustling Second and Third streets in the heart of downtown.
Then she spills her secret noodle recipe, or begins to.
“You go home, boil you some noodles. Salt, pepper, sugar and Hellmann’s,” she says. “We make, like, 20 pounds of dried noodles daily. It’s soooo simple.”
Then she all but scoffs.
She can’t believe the dish is so beloved.
Then again, Southern folks love their mayo.
“People who’ve never been here, I love looking at them take their first bite,” Kusawadee says. “They’re like, “What the heck? It’s cold!’ I run over to the table and I say, ‘It’s supposed to be cold.’”
There is, however, a technique to making the salad that she fails to elaborate on.
Call it the chef’s touch.
Ed, her brother, is the noodle master.
She says he boils the noodles, rinses them with cold water and lets them sit and drain until they’re dry. That takes at least 15 minutes.
Also, Ed tends to add one ingredient at a time.
“Then he’ll walk around the block. I don’t know. And then he comes back and puts in another ingredient and does his own thing,” Kusawadee says.
Once when Ed was on vacation in their native Thailand, Kusawadee was working in the kitchen and couldn’t get the salad’s texture right.
She called him via FaceTime: “Dude, what did we do wrong?”
She says, “I don’t know how he makes it. It’s creamy and fluffy.”
So perhaps the salad’s secret ingredients are not in your pantry after all, but rather in 30-plus years of noodle-making artistry.
Peacock, the eatery’s former manager, puts it best.
“You have to,” he says, “massage it.”
This story was originally published September 14, 2023 at 1:44 PM.