Our work hours are short. The shop opens twice a day—lunch hours are basically from noon to two, and dinner from five to eight. Altogether, we're open only six hours a day, but my wife comes to the shop around nine-thirty. She mops the floor, wipes the tables, puts new chopsticks in the holders on each table. I come a little later, around ten, which is the delivery time for the beef, vegetables, noodles, and other items. I've bought fresh beef from the same butcher for fifteen years. Nowadays, restaurants and shops like ours usually use imported beef from Australia and New Zealand. When the meat is delivered, it's already sliced. So for preparation I only have to marinate it. The marinade is basically Cantonese "shacha" sauce. But, yeah, it's more than that. We've got our own secret recipe.
Then we have to wash the vegetables. Now that the weather has turned cold, there's less water convolvulus [a popular summer vegetable with long and narrow green leaves], so we switch to spinach for the winter. Well, actually, there's water convolvulus in winter, but it turns hard ... it's not as juicy. Also, we have some Chinese cabbage for making soup. Each day, we use more than ten catties of vegetables [one catty is slightly more than a pound]. Beef is around ten catties also. Then we have to slice up a small quantity of beef kidneys, hearts, and intestines in advance for the soup—that makes cooking faster later.
Around ten-thirty, we make two cookers of rice. That's enough for about sixty orders of fried rice. Oh, one more thing. We also have to put things out on the gas stove—you know, cooking utensils, plates, and all that. This is an on-the-spot stir-fry shop, so we really don't have too much preparation to do. Sometimes, there's one or two early customers. If we're done with the preparation, I'll start taking orders.
After each mealtime, one of us will collect all the dirty plates and wash them all together by hand. It saves time not to do it one by one. Normally, we have fifty to sixty customers for each meal. Sometimes, there are close to one hundred—so there are a hundred plates and a hundred bowls to wash after each meal. Well, I'm used to it. It doesn't bother me at all. Usually it's my wife who does the dishes and it only takes her half an hour. This noon was lousy. I sold less than forty orders—half my normal business. Since the beginning of the year, business hasn't been as regular. I think it's the recession.
The work is heavy during the rush hours. Each dish usually takes me one minute for the [fried] rice or noodles and one minute for the beef and vegetables. But I'm used to it. If there's a swarm of customers, I can speed up and make thirty or forty dishes an hour. The wok holds about two catties. I hold it with my left hand and I have to "shovel-up" a couple of times during each frying [the action is a quick jerk of the heavy wok upwards from the burner to flip the contents on the bottom of the pan to the top in order to ensure even heating and cooking]. I'm used to it, though. I'm no green hand.
We only serve a few items: fried beef with rice, noodles, or rice noodles; egg soup; and all kinds of beef organ soups. And I'm responsible for all the cooking. Basically, after an order comes in, I cook the beef and vegetables and the noodles or rice separately. If you mix them together and stir-fry at the same time, the dish won't look very good. Besides, some dishes have more meat than others. That's why I stir-fry some beef with the vegetables first and leave it on a plate; then I prepare the exact portion of rice or noodles and put it on the plate my wife has prepared. When she takes an order, she simply puts the rice or noodles [to be stir-fried] on the plate to my right and I know what the order is. We don't have to talk or yell, like so many noisy Chinese restaurants. This requires understanding between partners.
There's no secret knowledge about the dishes I cook. Taiwanese don't like rare beef, so you've got to cook it thoroughly. This means you use a hot fire. And the noodles have to be softened so they absorb just the right amount of chicken broth. That's about it. When I was young, I read cookbooks just for reference. There weren't many of them. Most of the time, some friends who worked in restaurants would pass them to me. But I didn't imitate those dishes—they're "big dish" [formal banquet] items. I just tried to understand the principles of cooking and maybe learn some tricks. I think you have to create your own style.
I like to keep it simple. This is my style. I learned it from my father. If I use garlic, I won't use ginger or green onion with it. If I stir-fry spinach and beef, I won't add tomatoes or anything else. There's no great philosophy to it—I just don't want to make my dish look like chop suey. I haven't bothered to invent new recipes because I think the original ones have their own good characteristics. And I haven't tried to add other items to the menu because I don't want to make my work too complicated. Keeping it simple is my major principle.
There're no special orders accepted here—because that causes me trouble! This place is supposed to be popular for noodles. We only sell a few all-time favorites. This isn't a service-oriented restaurant that provides personalized services like cooking special orders. I don't accept demands like that. Too tiring. I've always dealt with these few items, and I've gotten used to cooking them. If I try to expand into other stuff, my work won't be as smooth as it is now. I'd feel hassled. Besides, I wouldn't want another person to stand in my position [in front of the stove]. I'm the only cook in this shop and I'd like to keep it that way. It's simpler. I've only got a burner for frying and a smaller burner for soup. How can I cook more items? We're just two people. There's a limit to what we can do, and we won't hire help. Nowadays it isn't easy to hire help in this kind of place because of the work—and here you do work!
Ever since I was twenty, a couple years after graduating from high school, I've been in this business. It's been over thirty years now. At first, I was helping my father at a night market in the western district [of Taipei]. It was a noodle stand. Ten years later, I got married and bought this place for one-and-a-half million dollars from my savings [roughly US$37,500 in those days] and opened my own noodle shop. My father closed up his business and retired. Business has been OK. I can make about eighty to a hundred thousand bucks a month [US$3,000 to $3,800] and we pay less than thirty thousand in taxes a year on this small operation. I can live with that, even though we don't make as much money as in the past. Money was worth more back then. That's why I could buy a second apartment in Chungho [a Taipei suburb] ten years ago.
Half my customers are students [from two nearby universities] and half are office workers and store clerks from the neighborhood. The employees at the hospital near here and the water company often come here, too. These college kids are polite. Even if they've waited for quite a while, or if sometimes I've missed their order, they rarely complain. In the past, most of my customers were illiterate and they could be really rude. I guess it's better now because the average educational level is higher. Young people always say "please," "thank you," and "excuse me." And they seldom try to order me around. Well, this is a nice area; lots of professors, teachers, students, and government employees live around here. Higher class people.
So, it's a passable job. But still it's hard work. I can't wait to get off work and get out of the clothes I wear at the shop—they always have a greasy, kitchen smell. The most comfortable time is at night, when I go home, take a bath, and change into clean clothes that smell like soap. I sit down, make some tea, and sip it while I listen to my chatty younger daughter tell about her day.
Thirty years ago, Taiwan's economic situation was not as good as it is today. Most people were thinking about how to increase their family finances. As long as they made money in their job, they tended to stick to it. People then weren't afraid of hard work. But today, kids are different. They hate to work—not to mention doing hard work. My daughters even hate to come here. On holidays, they like to hang out with their friends, not be here with Mom and Dad. They won't want to do this kind of job. It's too much for them—and, frankly, I don't want them to do this either. Since they have the freedom to choose other jobs, I hope they can do whatever they're interested in. I wouldn't want them to inherit the shop. Honestly! I only wish they could kind of understand that hard work pays. I hope they can see for themselves that their Mom and Dad have worked so hard so that the family could have some money to enjoy life a little. Like they can go to expensive private colleges without working part time or taking summer jobs. And I can have extra money to collect a few antique teapots.
—interview by Eugenia Yun