Fu Hang Soy Milk Taipei

Fu Hang Soymilk - Taipei (Taiwan)

Breakfast in Taiwan plays by its own rules. Hot, savory, multi-component, eaten at a counter or a plastic stool, and built around one non-negotiable: soy milk in some form. Fuhang, on the second floor of the Huashan Market building, is one of the canonical addresses.

The line starts on the sidewalk before six and climbs the wide concrete staircase to the second floor. The Hsu family has been running it for over half a century. Everything is made within sight: shaobing baked against the inside walls of a tandoor-style oven, youtiao going into the oil one length at a time, soy milk warming in a vat the size of a small bathtub.

A Taiwanese breakfast is a constellation, not a dish. It's also a carb-on-carb-on-carb meal that makes more sense once you read it as a relic of an agrarian economy, the kind of breakfast that had to carry a day in the fields. At its center is doujiang (豆漿), warm soy milk, sweet (甜) or savory (鹹). The savory version is curdled with vinegar and soy sauce, dressed with dried shrimp, scallions, pickled radish, and a torn piece of youtiao that softens in the broth. The rest of the table: shaobing (燒餅), the flaky baked flatbread; youtiao (油條), long fried dough sticks; dan bing (蛋餅), a thin egg crepe rolled around fillings; fan tuan (飯糰), sticky rice wrapped around youtiao and pickled greens. Most of this came over with the Nationalist migration after 1949, Northern Chinese and Shanghainese traditions that Taiwan kept and remixed into its own register.

I had the savory doujiang, a shaobing with egg, and a pastry off the rack. The doujiang arrived in a melamine bowl, the surface broken into soft curds, the youtiao already sinking, steam still rising off it. The shaobing with egg is the kind of breakfast sandwich that makes ours look thin: flaky outside, slightly oily inside, a folded omelet pressing the structure together.

Half an hour later you are back on the staircase, and the line behind you hasn't gotten any shorter.

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