The Silk Road has added a new stop in College Park at Zhang’s Noodles.

The newest addition to the local dining scene at 7313 Baltimore Ave. specializes in Lanzhou hand-pulled beef noodle soup, a popular dish from the city in Northwest China that was a major stopping point on the Northern Silk Road more than a millennium ago.

The hand-pulled lamian noodles are related to the Uyghur laghman noodles from farther west served at Hyattsville’s Marco & Polo restaurant and are a specialty of the area.

Lanzhou is now as well known for its noodles as New Orleans is for its beignets, and the local government is now engaged in a fierce copyright war over who gets to call their dishes Lanzhou laiman in the tens of thousands of restaurants around China.

Lanzhou noodles recently came to the greater D.C. area with the arrival of Lanzhou Hand Pull Noodle in Gaithersburg. At Zhang’s, chef and co-owner Zeng Rui Zhang, who moved to the area from New York City, has a slightly different take on the dish.

“Zhang’s signature bowl goes for baroque compared with the Lanzhou standard: not just with his multispecies broth, but also with the ingredients submerged in the liquid, including tripe, beef, pickled greens, romaine leaves and more (all of which can be set afire with the chile oil available on the table),” Washington Post critic Tim Carman wrote.