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When chilly winter winds whip through Taipei of Taiwan Province, many Taiwanese like to slip into hard-to-find eateries to warm themselves up with steamy bowls of noodles - one of the specialities in this mecca for Chinese cuisine.
Some of the best restaurants are in the capital's bustling eastern shopping district, where glitzy designer stores line the main streets and back alleys feature restaurants selling favorite dishes from China's mainland, as well as traditional Taiwanese meals.
One shop where you can warm yourself up is called Ching Mei. It's in a basement food court, wedged between a tattoo parlor and a fashion boutique selling traditional silk Chinese coats with colorful handsewn designs.
The smell of Ching Mei's zesty pepper and vinegar broth fills the air in the food court. Cooks labor behind a waist high L-shaped bar as clouds of steam rise from a massive metal pot.
Most customers come for the sweet-and-sour noodles. The boiled pork dumplings are also popular.
The dumplings - wrapped in a thin noodle that looks like ravioli - sit in a small pool of red oil sauce, topped with a dash of pepper and sprinkled with green onions.
The sweet-and-sour noodles swim in a luminescent red broth that gets its punch from ground hot peppers, oil and vinegar. Mixed in with the pepper is a crushed Sichuan spice, a small seed that numbs the mouth. Each bite of the soup is hotter than the last.
Ching Mei is run by a Taiwanese couple in their late 30s, but the restaurant's history goes back more than five decades to China's south-western province of Sichuan.
The store was founded by the father of the current cook, Lee Chih-ming. Lee's father was one of thousands of young soldiers in Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist army who went to Taiwan in 1949 when Chiang fled to the island.
Lee's father grew up in Sichuan, famous for its fiery cuisine. He watched his mother cook and later learned how to make peppery dishes on his own.
But he didn't open a restaurant until he retired in 1976 and his friends encoura-ged him to try selling his noodles and red oil dumplings.
Those who don't like spicy food should head to another popular eatery nearby, Tu Hsiao Yueh. The shop serves up one of Taiwan's traditional favorites, "Dan zai" noodles.
Tu Hsiao Yueh boasts a history of over 100 years that began in the southwestern coastal city of Tainan in 1895.
The store's name means "slack season" - a period when fishermen came ashore because the seas were too violent for fishing. During that time, the restaurant's founder, Hung Yu-tou, would sell his noodles outside temples in southern Taiwan.
Hung would use a shoulder pole - or "dan" in Chinese - to carry his boxes of noodles, bowls, chopsticks, stove and coal. The noodles were named "dan zai" after the shoulder pole the vendors used.
The thin noodles, made of wheat flour or translucent rice flour called "mi fen," are topped with juicy beef, shrimp, ground garlic and parsley. The broth has a robust flavor with a touch of shrimp flavor.
Waiters and waitresses race back and forth between tables and the open kitchen. The air is filled with the clatter of clanging ceramic bowls and cries like, "Mi fen dan zai noodles for table three," in the Taiwanese dialect.
The family's secret recipe has been passed down from son to son for four generations, says Hsueh Chun-hsiung, who manages the shop in Taipei. And that's what keeps customers coming back, Hsueh says.
(eastday.com January 29, 2003)
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