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 is braised pork rice, as expected.
Just below it, written in white, is Taiwanese chicken rice.
A white bowl sits in the shadow of a brown one.
It is not the main character.
But it has not been erased either.
Looking around the room,
more people are choosing the white bowl than I expected.
Here, a thought forms.
The place that sells the most chicken rice in Taiwan
may not be a chicken rice shop at all,
but the king of braised pork rice.
Finished brown, unsettled white
Braised pork rice is a finished dish.
The ratio of fat.
The depth of soy sauce.
The boundary between sweetness and salt.
Wherever you eat it,
there is a shape that feels like an answer.
Huxu Zhang succeeded in reproducing that standard
at the scale of a city.
There is little room left for change.
Chicken rice is different.
Some shops use turkey.
Others substitute chicken.
The meat may be shredded finely or left coarse.
Oil may be generous, or barely there.
Some bowls carry the aroma of fried shallots.
Others remain almost entirely white.
Even at Huxu Zhang,
the chicken rice looks slightly borrowed.
It feels like a dish placed into an empty space
by reusing the system built for braised pork rice.
Why no chicken rice empire appears
Across Taiwan,
there are countless signs reading Chiayi turkey rice.
Independent shops are everywhere.
Yet no dominant chain rises above them.
The reason may be simple.
No one can say,
this is chicken rice.
A dish without a defined goal
cannot be standardized.
Its taste cannot be leveled.
It cannot move easily through logistics.
It cannot expand as a brand.
As a result,
chains that already control distribution and storefronts,
those built for braised pork rice,
end up supplying chicken rice as well.
A king ruling another dish.
Strange, but efficient.
The space inside the white bowl
This is not a pessimistic view.
To lack a fixed form
is to remain unfixed.
Braised pork rice is complete,
and therefore difficult to evolve further.
Chicken rice is not.
It is still shifting.
Still being tested.
The white bowl I ate at Huxu Zhang today
felt less like a finished product
and more like a prototype.
That incompleteness
may be the dish’s true nature.
Taiwanese food culture
is not made only of finished kings.
At the feet of the throne,
there are dishes that keep changing quietly.
Chicken rice
is a white bowl still in motion.
