許家邨扁食 - Taipei (Taiwan)

Some of the most magical street food carts are the ones with no name.

This cart parks every afternoon on the sidewalk of Lane 135, Section 1, Fuxing South Road, behind Zhongxiao Sogo, in front of a small wonton shop called 許家邨扁食. The shop has a sign and a permanent address. The cart has neither. To find it, you give the wonton shop’s name.

The couple working the cart have been there for more than two decades, and the people who line up know exactly what they are looking for.

What they make here is jiu cai hezi (韭菜盒子), Chinese chive pockets. The dish is Northern Chinese, often traced to Shandong, where wheat fields and garlic chives both thrive. At its homeland, it is usually pan-fried: flat, crescent, gentle. The Taipei version, by way of the 1949 wave of Nationalist soldiers and families who carried Northern-Chinese cooking south, mostly ended up deep-fried. This cart sits firmly on the deep-fried end. The pockets sit in a wide, shallow pan of shimmering oil, every stage of cooking visible at once: pale and raw next to ones slowly turning blond, next to ones already deep golden and cracked, ready to come off the heat.

The filling, prepped right next to the pan in a steel bowl the size of a small drum, is mostly green: chopped Chinese chives, a tangle of translucent glass noodles and small cubes of pressed tofu carrying soy and a little fat. The dough is rolled, filled and pleated by hand on the spot. One pair of hands wraps, the other works the pan.

Bite into one and the crust does two things at once. The bottom is thick, golden, shattered like a flat doughnut. The top is thinner and lacquer-glossy, giving way to a hot, herbal, slightly oily green tangle inside. Paid with a pair of coins. Eaten standing on the sidewalk in mid-afternoon light, half a pocket in each hand, watching a stroller go past and the line behind you reset.

The cart leaves no trace when it packs up. The wonton shop behind it stays open as it always has, indifferent to the address it accidentally became.

(Versão em Português nos comentários) Less