Fried noodles from Yarsa Nepalese Cuisine is on the menu at Noodlefest in San Francisco's Chinatown and North Beach.

At the end of the month, a highly anticipated festival will bring San Francisco’s Chinatown and North Beach together over everyone’s favorite carb: noodles.

Noodlefest, coming back after more than a decade, will take place Saturday, April 30, with dishes from 29 restaurants. With diverse offerings such as Portofino’s squid ink ravioli and Begoni Bistro’s wontons with flaming chili oil, plus dishes from some heavy hitters like Mister Jiu’s, it’s not surprising that presale tickets have already sold out.

There will be some $35 tickets, which include five sample-size dishes, available on the day of the event. Festivities will be on Grant Avenue between Pacific Avenue and Green Street.

Organizers are hoping Noodlefest will be a boon for the local businesses, which were among the hardest hit during the pandemic. Restaurants were forced to close; some pivoted to takeout, many opened parklets and all constantly adjusted to new health guidelines.

In both Chinatown and North Beach, business declined significantly during the peak of the pandemic. In Chinatown, the income from restaurants and hotels declined by 67% in 2020 compared with 2019. While 2021 was a little better, business was still about half of what it was pre-pandemic. Meanwhile, the hospitality industry in North Beach saw income drop by 59% from 2019 in 2020. In 2021, business improved but was still 27% less than pre-pandemic levels, according to sales tax data from the city.

“Our local recovery efforts should include direct investments in our small businesses as well as community building,” said Sunny Angulo, chief of staff for Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who represents the two neighborhoods. “Our restaurants and our nonprofits really stepped up during the pandemic, and the city needs to help them in this next phase, or risk losing them.”

Tortellini with Parmesan will be one of the options at San Francisco’s Noodlefest from Italian Homemade Company.

The festival started in 2010 in San Francisco and ran for two years. At the time, it was an all-volunteer effort, run by the Chinatown Community Development Center and the North Beach Business Association. Restaurants were not compensated for their participation, and the festival proved to be too much work to keep going.

During the pandemic, however, Peskin and Malcolm Yeung, executive director of the Chinatown Community Development Center, talked about bringing Noodlefest back one day as a way to bring people together amid the pandemic. The two “were reminiscing about happier times, when the neighborhoods were more together,” Angulo said.

This year, Peskin advocated for funding. With the help of the Office of Economic & Workforce Development, restaurants will be paid to participate for the first time.

Those restaurants are preparing many dishes of different shapes and sizes representing different regions and cuisines. Mona Lisa will make gnocchi pomodoro, Yarsa Nepalese Cuisine will serve fried Nepalese noodles, Taishan Cuisine will sling scallop steamed vermicelli, and VIP Coffee and Cake Shop is preparing baked spaghetti with minced beef, to name a few.

Sam Wo’s pork rice noodle roll will be one of the featured dishes at Noodlefest in San Francisco.

Festival attendees can also expect live music, noodle-making demonstrations and a chance to see celebrity judge Martin Yan, who recently won the James Beard Foundation’s 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award. (Full disclosure: Chronicle critic Soleil Ho is also a judge.)

Ida Pantaleo Zoubi, president of the North Beach Business Association and co-owner of Cafe Trieste, said the event is about unity, not competition between the two neighboring districts.

“People’s routines have changed,” Zoubi said. “We gotta remind them: Chinatown is totally open, North Beach is totally open. It took a while to come back, but we’re here.”

All the organizers said they were excited just to have an outdoor festival that families and local residents can enjoy after a very long two years of being inside. Tickets will be given to local residents through tenant organizations to ensure that people living in the neighborhoods feel welcome to attend, according to Amy Zhou, urban planner at the Chinatown Community Development Center.

“There are so many creative solutions to keep our neighborhoods resilient and strong, especially in the wake of COVID, and this is just another solution that’s really creative and activates the spaces and brings people out on the streets,” she said. “That’s really important after two years of this pandemic.”

Noodlefest: 2-4 p.m. Saturday, April 30. Grant Avenue between Pacific Avenue and Green Street, San Francisco. Limited tickets will be available in front of New Sun Hong Kong at 606 Broadway. www.sfnoodlefest.com

Momo Chang is a Bay Area freelance writer. Email: food@sfchronicle.com