The noodle chefs at the Noodle & Congee Corner inside the Grand Lisboa casino hotel in Macau train for years to master the art of making handmade noodles, a specialty of the Shanxi region of central China.

They cut, slice, pull and even use a chopstick to create different noodle shapes. But the signature noodle dish here is the yi gen mian ('single-strand noodle') bowl, which features a single, continuous noodle, three meters long.

Dough: The secret to handmade noodles isn't in the 'pulling' so much as in the 'putting together' of the dough, says Cheung Chi-shing, the executive chef of Grand Lisboa's Chinese kitchens. Using a highly refined, high-gluten flour from Inner Mongolia helps produce a dough that's especially malleable and makes a noodle that remains chewy when cooked, not getting soggy even when left in the hot soup for more than an hour.

One strand: To make the single-strand noodle, the chef first prepares the dough by rolling out a thin log that is then laid flat in a spiral (it somewhat resembles a lollipop). The raw dough then sits in oil to keep it from sticking together. To cook it, the chef takes one end and 'whips' the dough log up and down in a wok filled with boiling water. The action stretches the noodle out. As it falls into the boiling water, it cooks almost instantly.

Soup base: Diners can choose between bases of pork, beef or hot-and-sour soup. The most classic is the pork-bone soup, which has a milky consistency.

Toppings: These added ingredients