If your new semester resolution is to try out more great St. Louis restaurants, you don’t need to look any further than the Delmar Loop’s Aug. 1 addition, Corner 17. Nestled between Starbucks and Qdoba, Corner 17 offers up a fresh new selection of Chinese fare, focusing on staples like noodle dishes, barbecued skewers and fresh tea drinks.

Co-owner Guang Zhao says that soon after moving to St. Louis at 15, it became her “dream to bring something authentic to the area here, not just buffet or sweet-and-sour chicken.” Corner 17’s hand-pulled noodles and Chinese barbecued skewers certainly fill that void. These two types of food might not be widely available in St. Louis, but in China, they are on just about every street corner.

For those unfamiliar with hand-pulled n¬¬oodles, make sure to grab a seat facing the back of the restaurant. As soon as you order your noodles, you’ll be able to watch the cook make them from behind a glassed-in corner next to the door for the kitchen. The cooking style is not only fun to watch but also gives the noodles a special chewiness that makes hand-pulled noodles a favorite for many.

Half of the noodle dishes at Corner 17 come in soups and the other half in sauce. I chose the beef noodles in sauce ($8.99). The flavoring was average, but the tastiness of the noodles made up for the lack of distinction on the sauce front. The portion I ordered was enough for two people, so splitting a meal to knock the price tag down would be a great option.

The skewers come in a variety of meats and veggies. The chicken gizzards and regular chicken skewers are the cheapest at $0.79, and the chicken backbone and mushrooms are the most expensive at $3.99. The prices on the latter two seemed to be outliers, but judging by the Chinese on the menu, it looks like these two are plates rather than single skewers.

For a beverage, I tried the Corner 17 milk tea, which seems like a synonym for “original flavor” bubble tea as there was no other generic milk tea on the menu. For any tea drink, you can request either black or green tea, which is brewed fresh every day. One of my dining companions also ordered the milk tea and remarked that he could “really taste the green tea in this.”

Corner 17’s focus on using its own brewed tea, fresh milk and fruit with only small amounts of powder puts its milk tea a step above the neighboring St. Louis Bubble Tea’s versions, not to mention that the food is much tastier. Each milk tea costs $3.75, so by splitting a plate of noodles, you can get a meal with a drink for less than $10.

When it comes to the boba, or tapioca balls, a key part of the bubble tea composition, Corner 17 is equally vigilant about freshness. It makes a set amount of boba each day so that it never has any day-old boba. Aside from the milk teas, the menu also contains a variety of other drinks such as fluffy ice, smoothies, slushes, fruit juices, fruit teas and two more curiously named beverages: sagos and WOW milks.

If there’s one downside of a meal at Corner 17, it’s the waiting time. Just in the first few weeks of business, the restaurant is still looking for staff members. For the near future at least, your meal might need to begin with a side of patience. Nevertheless, Corner 17 seems set to become a Loop favorite.