I went to bed on Sunday looking forward to Memorial Day, not only because it was a day off from work, but because I had arranged to spend the entire day by myself, doing whatever I wanted, with zero commitments or plans. (These sorts of days are a rarity when you have an infant.) But I woke up on Monday morning with that horrible, back-of-the-throat burning sensation that unfailingly creeps forward through the skull, occupies the sinuses, and becomes a cold. By the afternoon I was a feverish, mucus-y mess. What was supposed to be a great day was turning bad fast. I needed soup, stat. So I headed to Hue Ky Mi Gia in the International District.

For a long time pho was my cold elixir of choice—an aromatic broth and fresh jalapeños working to clear out the gunk—but over the years, I've begun looking to Chinese egg noodle soups for comfort and medicine. I like an oily broth with rich, roasted pork, doused with plenty of that crimson chili oil that sits in those little clear pots on the table. Besides spice, I crave fat because in my mind I picture it sliding down my throat, coating and soothing burnings cells, smoothing out the rough, ragged edges of frazzled nerves.

I hadn't been to Hue Ky Mi Gia in a few years (I've been involved in a long-term relationship with the House Noodle Soup, which comes with roast pork, shrimp, and fried chicken, at Mi La Cay, another Vietnamese-owned restaurant specializing in Chinese noodle dishes, for a while now). It's no secret the noodle soups at Hue Ky Mi Gia are great, as evidenced by the fact that there was a fifteen-minute wait on a Monday afternoon.

But I had forgotten just how satisfying they really are. The bulk of the restaurant's menu is composed of almost 40 different noodle-and-protein combinations: egg noodles, rice noodles, or rice vermicelli with accompaniments like barbecue pork, sui kau dumplings, braised duck, fish balls, tofu, pork intestines, and spareribs.

But on Monday afternoon, sweating while slurping my way through a bowl of egg noodles with barbecue pork and wontons (the had already run out of sui kau by 3 p.m.), I was reminded that it isn't just the major components of Hue Ky Mi Gia's soups that makes them excellent—it's everything else. Yes, the pork was moist and tender, steeped with anise and five-spice, and the wontons were dense and peppery, but the real flavor and enjoyment comes from the spices and bits floating in the broth: fresh lettuce, scallions, chives, chrysanthemum leaves, thin stalks of Chinese celery, and, ah, cubes of fatty, crackly roasted pork skin.

I made my way through the bowl in an almost unbreakable trance, dipping chopsticks full of meat and herbs into a little dish of red vinegar and chili sauce, happily slurping noodles and spicy broth, pausing only to occasionally blow my nose. When you're faced with the inevitable dulling of your sense of taste, nothing is more thrilling than getting lost in the shifting flavors of soup.