As you walk into Shang Lamb Soup, there’s a waft of cumin in the air. Take your seat and you’ll see large, cloudy bowls in front of every diner. It’s an intimate venue of barely 20 seats, and nobody is saying a word: they’re quietly appreciating their heaping bowl of lamb soup, which is a very good reason to come to Hurstville.

“As long as I’ve been in Sydney, I’ve noticed there are no lamb specialists,” Shang Lamb’s owner Simon Jing tells Broadsheet. Jing arrived in Australia in 2004 to study, and in 2018 decided to open the shop with his partner Suki Wu. Neither had any experience in professional cooking or in the hospitality industry. But they went for it.

“I was always passionate about cooking, you know? Everyone enjoyed my dishes,” says Jing. Before opening, he took several trips back to China to visit different areas and compile his ingredient list and recipes – putting it all together as you see on the menu today.

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Jing hails from Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi in northern China. Shanxi is regarded as the pre-eminent region for noodles in China; you can find noodles of all shapes and sizes, made with different grains and starches. While the Shang team doesn’t make the noodles in-house, it offers a range of Aussie-made options: thin, thick, flat and sweet-potato noodles.

The signature “super lamb soup” comes with the sweet-potato noodles. “The traditional way in my hometown is to go with a potato stretch noodle, highly different to the one we serve here,” Jing says. “We can only get a sweet-potato stretch noodle, which is more chewy and less filling.” They’re springy, slippery and highly slurp-able, lending a contrasting texture you don’t often get from other noodles.

It’s the flavour of the lamb that shines through, though. And it’s due to the days of prep work. Master stock-style, a daily batch of soup starts with the previous day’s broth. A lamb neck bone (with a bit of fat and marrow) is added, then cooked over a high-heat flame for several hours, rendering it into a milky, toothsome soup with a silky texture. To be honest, despite the wider menu, this one’s irresistible. It’s a fragrant and delicious baitang broth – noodle-soup lovers, take note.

On top rides incredibly soft slices of lamb shoulder. The meat takes two days of preparation, very much like the chashu used in ramen. It’s marinated, tied and rolled; stewed for hours; rested; then chilled overnight. In the hot soup, it makes for an extremely tender bite. “We normally go through 100 kilograms of lamb a week,” Jing says.

While there’s a lengthy list of soups and noodles, the other dish the team’s known for is lamb skewers, a street food snack found throughout China. Here they come in threes – after you choose spicy or non-spicy. Expect a nice mix of meat interspersed with fat on a skewer that’s cooked briskly in a turbocharged oven after being seasoned with cumin, MSG, salt and garlic chicken salt. The lamb pieces are deeply savoury, bouncy and burst in your mouth with flavour.

Before leaving, I ask Jing if Shang has a special meaning. He replies quickly, “No, it’s just a Chinese character that means ‘up’.”

Though my Mandarin skills are limited, I know the various ways you could use shang, and it all makes sense – they want to make a lamb soup that comes out on top. And I’m happy to say they’ve done it.

Shang Lamb Soup
6/380 Forest Road, Hurstville

Hours:
Mon 11.30am–9.30pm
Wed to Sun 11.30am–9.30pm

@shanglamb