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Trying IMPOSSIBLE BURGER & BEST Knife Cut NOODLES!

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A weekend food crawl through Seattle and Tacoma turns into a real test of two very different culinary trends.

Mike Chen spends his first full weekend in Washington state chasing two things that couldn’t be further apart on a menu: a bowl of hand-pulled Sichuan noodles and a lab-engineered veggie patty designed to bleed like beef. The YouTuber’s vlog “Trying IMPOSSIBLE BURGER & BEST Knife Cut NOODLES!” tracks him from Seattle’s Chinatown-International District down to Tacoma, sampling regional specialties along the way. The result is less a single restaurant review than a snapshot of what a serious eater packs into 48 hours in the Pacific Northwest.

• Chen visits Seven Stars Pepper Szechwan Restaurant in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District specifically for its handmade knife-cut noodles and dan dan noodles.
• He pairs the noodle crawl with a taste test of the newly updated Impossible Burger, built on soy and heme to mimic ground beef’s sear and juiciness.
• The Tacoma leg of the trip adds Wally’s Seafood, alongside Chinatown-International District stops at Hood Famous Café + Bar, Ox Pho & Grill, and Sizzling Pot Chinese Sauerkraut Fish.

The Noodle Stop Everyone Points To

Seven Stars Pepper has built its reputation in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District on noodles that are cut, not extruded — dough shaved directly off the block with a blade, giving each strand an uneven, ropy edge that grabs sauce differently than a machine-cut noodle would. Chen orders the knife-cut noodles alongside the restaurant’s dan dan noodles, the Sichuan staple built on a chili-oil-and-sesame-paste base with minced pork and preserved vegetables stirred through at the table.

The draw for a noodle-focused eater is texture as much as flavor. Knife-cut noodles hold a thicker, chewier bite than thinner wheat noodles, which is why Sichuan kitchens lean on them for dishes meant to carry heavy, oily sauces without going mushy. It’s the kind of dish that rewards a first-timer willing to drive into the Chinatown-International District specifically for it, rather than stumbling on it by accident.

Putting the Impossible Burger to a Real Test

The other half of the title is the Impossible Burger, and Chen treats it less like a novelty and more like a direct stand-in for ground beef. The patty’s pitch rests on heme, the iron-carrying molecule pulled from soy roots that gives real meat its color and much of its savory depth — Impossible Foods engineers a plant-based version of it to chase the same sear, smell, and pink-to-brown color shift a beef patty goes through on a grill.

The Impossible Burger is so delicious that you can’t differentiate it from the real burger.

That’s the standard Chen holds it to across the vlog — not “is this a good veggie burger” but “would a committed meat eater notice the switch.” Judged against a bowl of dan dan noodles built on decades of Sichuan technique, the burger is the newer, stranger experiment of the two, and Chen treats the comparison as the whole point of the outing.

Crossing the Chinatown-International District

Beyond the headline stops, Chen works through a run of Chinatown-International District spots that round out the weekend’s menu. Hood Famous Café + Bar brings Filipino-influenced baked goods into the mix, a contrast to the Sichuan heat at Seven Stars, while Ox Pho & Grill and Sizzling Pot Chinese Sauerkraut Fish give him two more angles on regional Chinese and Vietnamese cooking within a few blocks of each other. It’s the kind of density that makes the district a natural home base for a food-focused itinerary rather than a single-stop detour.

The Drive South to Tacoma

The second day of the trip pulls Chen out of Seattle proper and down to Tacoma, where Wally’s Seafood anchors the Pacific Northwest half of the weekend. Trading Sichuan chili oil and plant-based patties for regional seafood gives the vlog a clean structural split — one day built around Chinatown-International District staples, the next built around what Tacoma’s waterfront has to offer.

Chen’s format tracks with the kind of food-travel content that keeps climbing YouTube’s trending charts, where audiences increasingly want the play-by-play of a real neighborhood crawl over a polished studio review. It’s the same appetite that’s kept side-by-side taste tests a reliable hook in food-focused video more broadly.

Seven Stars Pepper’s knife-cut noodles and dan dan bowl remain the anchor of the trip, with the Impossible Burger stop functioning as the detour that gives the vlog its title. Whether Chen circles back to Wally’s Seafood or the rest of the Chinatown-International District on a future Washington swing is the open question the weekend leaves on the table.