Ching Chao Yin restaurant is decorated in the rich and colorful Ching dynasty palace style, and it has an equally exquisite menu. A porcelain pot of traditional Chinese tea is served when the waitress presents the menu, a subtle encouragement to order at leisure. Designed to inform as well as tantalize the palate, the menu has more than fifty items, many of them accompanied by photographs and detailed explanations. Roughly half of the selections are traditional Peking snack foods, such as cinnamon flower cakes and hsing-jen cha, a sweet drink made from ground almonds and rice. There are also well over a dozen different noodle and other wheaten food dishes.
Making "crossing the bridge noodles" at Ren Ho Yuan restaurant. A steaming hot broth cooks the thin-sliced ingredients in the bowl.
Ching Chao Yin aims for quality, rather than quantity; a bowl of sliced lamb and Chinese cabbage cooked in soup with noodles costs more than US$4.00, and is not enough to be filling. But guests will want to order a number of dishes, and perhaps try more than one kind of the noodles which have made this restaurant so popular. Try, for example, the bean paste noodles or cold sesame paste noodles.
The restaurant's ta-lu mien, a special noodle soup, is among the best in Taipei. To make this traditional northern noodle dish, cooks add sliced pork, Chinese cabbage, dried mushrooms, dried day lily flowers, black wood-ear mushrooms to a delicate pork broth which has been slightly thickened and flavored with soy sauce, then add a serving of boiled noodles. Unfortunately, Ching Chao Yin uses machine-made noodles. They are fresh, but not as tasty, or traditional, as knife-cut noodles.
Other wheaten foods on the menu include Eight Treasure wo wo tou, which is small steamed bread made from flour and cornmeal This was a favorite of the Empress Dowager. The empress is said to have been offered wo wo tou by a commoner to stave off hunger when her royal contingent was fleeing Peking to avoid the foreign troops who took over the city in the latter part of the nineteenth century. She liked the taste, and upon her return to the capital, ordered her imperial cooks to prepare a more elaborate version: hence, Eight Treasure wo wo tou ―a food now available outside the imperial court.
"Cat ear noodles"― one of several noodle specialties at the Shansi Restaurant in Taipei.
The Shansi Restaurant, named after the northern Chinese province, is well known to Taipei residents. In winter, the chances are that the restaurant will be filled with the smell of burning charcoal, because in addition to Shansi noodle specialties, the restaurant does a brisk business in Mongolian hot pot. Mini chimneys sticking up from the center of copper hot pots fill the restaurant with aromatic smoke.
The restaurant offers three main types of noodles: knife-cut noodles; a small, curled noodle called cat ear noodle; and po-yu mien, a hand-shaped noodle about two inches long, thin on the ends and thicker in the middle which looks like a fish or eel. The knife-cut noodles are the best in Taipei, fragrant and chewy without being rubbery. Try also the bean paste noodles and beef noodles.
The restaurant's fried noodles are especially worth trying. A favorite is mu-hsu fried noodles, made with pork, cabbage, and eggs ―delicious, and not oily. The sauce has just the right amount of spiciness, and clings to the jagged edge of knife cut noodles. The restaurant also makes its own version of scallion pancakes, about six inches in diameter. Prices are moderate, and if charcoal smoke is no problem, it is well worth a visit.
Healthy and tasty― a soup of pickled cabbage, pork, vermicelli, dried mushrooms, bean curd, and small clams.
Although the Ren Ho Yuan restaurant serves Yunnan-style food from southwestern China, it deserves mention here because it prepares a traditional noodle dish unavailable elsewhere in Taipei: kuo-chiao noodles, or "crossing the bridge noodles." According to the story behind these noodles, there was a young man who crossed a bridge each day on his long walk to work. He usually carried a lunch, but on one blustery winter day he forgot it. His wife wanted to take his lunch to him, but was afraid it would be icy cold by the time she arrived. She finally hit on a novel idea. After catching up to him just as he was crossing the bridge, she cooked the meal right there. First, she boiled a pot of water over a small fire, then added raw ingredients, which cooked instantly. Finally, she added some parboiled noodles to create a piping hot meal.
Ren Ho Yuan makes the dish in basically the same way. A large bowl of hot broth is brought to the table, and paper thin slices of raw pork kidney, vegetables, bean curd skin, and scallions are put into the bowl. The ingredients are then swished around in the hot broth, and then another bowl of parboiled noodles is added, completing the dish.
The noodles themselves are worthy of mention, as they are made from flour mixed with eggs, with no water added. The dough is then rolled out and cut into thin strips with a large knife. It is a long and tedious process. The owners had previously tried substituting machine-made noodles, but the results were not the same, and regular customers complained. Eventually, the cooks went back to making them by hand.
On either side of the narrow entrance to Ting Tai Feng restaurant, white-suited chefs diligently knead dough and roll it out for chiao-tzu and steamed pao-tzu. Just inside the doorway, steam rises from the bamboo steamers stacked a half dozen high. The restaurant is almost always packed, and it is difficult to find a street-level table. But there are second and third floors up a cramped stairway.
The restaurant specializes in the Shanghai-style of preparing traditional wheaten foods. The steamed chiao-tzu, stuffed with either pork or vegetables, are the finest in Taipei. The skin is especially moist and tender, and the filling tasty without being over-seasoned. Especially delicious are the steamed mini-dumplings called hsiao lung-pao, made with pork meat and crab. The skin is similar to a chiao-tzu, but it is pinched in the middle rather than on the sides, making it look like a large, albino Hershey kiss. About two inches in diameter on the bottom, each one is about two mouthfuls. Hold them with chopsticks, but have a spoon underneath to catch all the flavorful juices inside. Another variety, called shao-mai (but different from the Cantonese variety), has a slightly thicker skin, is stuffed with pork, and has a peeled shrimp on top. Ting Tai Feng is probably the most expensive restaurant of its type in Taipei ―but also easily the best.