Eat in the Corner

One of the Most Basic Soups Taiwanese pork meatball soup, known locally as gongwan tang, is one of the most basic soups on the table.Clear pork broth. Grayish pork balls floating inside.Celery and white pepper are added. Nothing more. Th...

A yellow sign on the street Walking through Taipei,I sometimes find myself standing beneath a yellow sign without noticing. Huxu Zhang.Everyone knows it as a place for braised pork rice. I step inside and look at the menu.The first line ...

―― A place name on every sign ―― In Taipei, and in Kaohsiung.On signs for Taiwanese chicken rice, the same two characters appear again and again. Chiayi. In narrow alleys and station-front diners,the place name repeats like a mark of ori...

Bread inside bread There is a basic pairing that defines a traditional Taiwanese breakfast.Baked bread, split open, with fried bread placed inside. Shaobing and youtiao. From a Japanese perspective, it looks puzzling.Bread filled with br...

The smell of oil at daybreak In a Taiwanese breakfast shop,the smell of oil always rises from somewhere.At the center of it is youtiao. At first glance, it looks like nothing more than fried bread.But when its lightness, hollow interior,...

A thin circle on the griddle In Taiwanese breakfast shops, the most common sight is a thin circle spreading quietly on a hot griddle.An egg is cracked, folded, and lightly pressed with the back of a knife.From this sequence comes dan bin...

A dish that settles between steam In a Taiwanese morning, inside the steam rising from soy milk,a bowl appears that is neither porridge nor soup.This is xian doujiang. It sits apart from sweet soy milk.It resembles chawanmushi or soft cu...

Savory soy milk, the hardest dish to explain In a Taiwanese breakfast shop, there is one dish that is often the hardest to understand.It is xian doujiang. Literally translated, it means savory soy milk.In practice, it is not simply a sou...

A different kind of density Fan tuan, sold at Taiwanese breakfast stalls, looks similar to Japanese onigiri.The idea behind it is different. The main difference is the rice.Japanese onigiri uses non-glutinous rice.Fan tuan uses glutinous...

A sweet default at breakfast Iced soy milk, known locally as bing doujiang, is the form that first appears when soy milk is ordered in a Taiwanese breakfast shop. It arrives cold.It is often unexpectedly sweet. It has little in common wi...