TAIPEI: Taiwanese food is new to New York; restaurants have been serving the island state’s eclectic fare in the city’s Chinatowns for years. What is new is the influx of businesses opened by a generation of Taiwanese American entrepreneurs bred on culinary pop-ups and social media, angling to introduce their ancestral cuisine to the widest possible audience. Ho Foods’ Richard Ho is one of these culinary ambassadors a former restaurant manager and self-taught cook from California’s San Gabriel Valley (a hotbed of niu rou mian, incidentally) who offers a choice of noodle and spice level with his hearty soup bowls.
Niu rou mian can also now be found at Turnstyle, the hectic subway-station food court below Columbus Circle, where Mission Chinese Food alum Edward Huang runs a Taiwanese stand called Zai Lai. His version is relatively light but utterly satisfying, made with beef from well-contented, locally raised cows and informed by some notes he took on reconnaissance missions to Taipei with a soup-guru cousin.
A beef-noodle-soup crawl could extend to Chelsea Market’s Very Fresh Noodles, whose rib-sticking rendition spotlights the kitchen’s rustic hand-pulled noodles, and then to Mimi Cheng’s, where the Taiwanese-American Cheng sisters have added it to their dumpling-centric menu. The city’s latest version has landed in Bushwick, where Faro chef Kevin Adey has put it on the menu of his new Sichuan restaurant, General Deb’s. This isn’t a case of mistaken culinary identity but an edible history lesson The iconic Taiwanese dish is said to have originated in the military villages that housed mainlanders after China’s civil war.
