Good to Eat Chef Tony Tung and General Manager Angie Lin have been at the restaurant game for a while. The wife-wife team opened Good to Eat almost eight years ago after operating as a regular pop-up for four years. Before then, they had slowly developed recipes and passionately shared the nuances of Taiwanese cuisine through their word-of-mouth supper clubs. Together, Lin and Tung, without prior food industry experience worked diligently toward strengthening the public’s understanding of Taiwanese cuisine. At Good to Eat, the dishes on the menu span different styles from night market fare, like a grilled whole squid “Yi Yeh Gan,” to homey offerings like a clay pot rice soup with bamboo shoots, shiitake mushrooms, and pork. “Taiwanese cuisine is more than just street food,” you’ll hear them say. They convey this emphatically through their dishes and a special jan ba bae tasting menu inspired by Taiwanese bando (roadside banquet) style cuisine. I chat with them about their journey, looking to the past, which bears memories of the challenges that led them to their present success and the flavors Tung strives day after day to recreate, sustain, and share.
Interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Since you both went into this without prior restaurant experience, how did you determine your roles?
Angie: We happen to be married partners. So I started by helping her and when we started, Tony didn’t speak any English. Food has become her way to express herself. Our food has become our way and her specific way to express her heritage and her passion for local ingredients and community.
My job is helping her express the story behind the dishes, and building a dining environment that we want to share with our friends. We don’t even feel it’s our customers, we feel they’re our friends.
Even just starting a pop up can be a scary thing. What were the conversations between you that were happening around this time?
Angie: It was indeed super scary. I know that the previous generations of immigrants before us, they had to open a restaurant because that’s probably the only way they can survive. For us, we were lucky that we chose to do this. When Tony was still living in Taiwan, she had another long career as an entrepreneur and a designer. After moving here, we settled in the Bay Area. In California, the dining themes kept changing so fast for the past ten years.
When Tony moved here, we really missed Taiwanese food so she started to host supper club evenings for our friends. Then the word got out and friends of friends were coming, and then friends of friends of friends. Every supper club, we were obsessed with wanting to introduce unique Taiwanese flavors. For every dish we wrote down why this is a dish we love, why we cooked this dish, and why this dish is so unique.
Us Taiwanese, as you know, we love eating. We are not only bonded by Taiwanese food. We just love eating. We love food. We witnessed how many regional Asian cuisines got modernized and elevated and how all the foodie communities start to appreciate Asian flavors. They are willing to discover different types of Asian flavors. That only made us realize how much we miss Taiwanese flavor sensibilities. Taiwanese flavor sensibility has been a very important concept of our restaurant.
That sensibility is very vague. How do you convey or capture that?
Angie: When we started our pop-up, it was pretty hard. Even nowadays, people say, “Oh I know Taiwanese food. You have stinky tofu, you have beef noodle soup.”
I’ve had to explain to customers like, “Yes we have those things but those are just street food, and we do love street food, don’t get me wrong, but in a country, it’s typical that we don’t just have street food.”
I totally agree!
Tony: Sometimes I feel really sad. Everyone knows ramen and sushi are Japanese. There’s Korean BBQ and kimchi, but what is Taiwanese food? I don’t want to hear only stinky tofu and beef noodle soup. Taiwan is so beautiful. Taiwan has a lot of history and good ingredients. How can I use our small restaurant to share this kind of story to people? That’s my goal.
Angie: Taiwan is a beautiful country with a geography and history that is very unique. It’s very typical for Taiwanese cuisine to have different styles and different influences that shape our flavor sensibilities. When we really want to eat our comfort foods, we can find something similar here but not done in the Taiwanese way. That’s how we started to cook.
Elaborate on the Taiwanese way and sensibility. How do you convey a feeling or a flavor that is sometimes subtle or intangible?
Tony: Like if there’s a certain Taiwanese spice or seasoning that is not available, I could just put something else in there and call it Taiwanese food, but I don’t do that because even for something like black vinegar, the Taiwanese flavor is so unique. I really need to make sure I get that vinegar so my dish will come out with the Taiwanese flavor I can share with my customers.
I really want to share what Taiwanese flavor include, what is Taiwanese 人情味 ren ching wei (a sense of human touch, connectedness, and kindness). For me, that is the true Taiwan flavor. Because 人情 ren ching is not easy to find anywhere. That’s really unique to the Taiwanese. So I start to study how to cook Taiwanese old-school food. I know I ate a lot when I was a child so I started to cook from my memory. I remember that kind of flavor.
I spent a lot of time doing trial and error, reading a lot of books. I think these past five years made me a lot more sensitive about flavors and ingredients. Every time I try to cook a new dish, Angie needs to try it. Sometimes with one dish I need to spend a couple days. You have to start the broths, prepare the ingredients, until the last step where you put everything together so you can achieve the different layers of flavors in one dish. I think I’ve come a really long way to figure out how I can cook those dishes.
Yeah I found that an unexpected part of learning Taiwanese cuisine that most people don’t often see is that it really does take finding the right kinds of people and asking questions. A lot of them are almost gone. So there’s a short window of time we have to learn. Even through reading books, sometimes the recipes are just four sentences!
Tony: Yes. It doesn’t describe it all, like what it’s supposed to look like or all the ingredients inside so you have to use your creative thinking to approach the recipes. There’s really a lot of things to learn. A lot of knowledge, we really don’t know.
How was it like initially to approach running a food business without prior restaurant knowledge or experience?
Tony: In the beginning, there was a lot of challenges for me. We rented a commercial kitchen and it was like, what is a commercial kitchen? How do I use this commercial equipment? There were so many things I did not understand and in the beginning, I could not speak very good English so I would cook and have people eat my food. I’d watch their face to see how they like it. They might say, “Oh it’s really delicious”, but I can feel whether they really like it or that it’s fake. I learned how to use the commercial kitchen and how to raise my skill level up. The process took me a couple years until now. Now I know how I can operate a real restaurant and how I can cook Taiwanese food. I have to say, me and Angie, we really spent a lot of time. This place is almost 8 years old. Every single day, we’re still talking about how we can make it better, how I can grow and learn more things.
Angie: I still remember that period of time. At the beginning, she really took this so seriously. We started our renting a commercial kitchen pretty early in the process. That’s part of the reason why we started to face public because she thought, I’m going to do a supper club for so many people. I want to do this the right way. We live in this tiny apartment. It’s not possible and also we don’t feel it’s good to cook out of a tiny kitchen. There, we met a lot of people. That period of time was so hard but looking back, we feel really grateful.
There were a lot of indie chefs and the commercial kitchen owner ran an incubator program before. So everyone told her how all the dishes she cooked were like a new fresh breeze. That’s when we realized that it’s not just from our perspective that we want to share this unique flavor with our friends. It’s for the public; they feel that this is something the market is missing. The commercial kitchen community invited her to do pop-up events together. Her first pop-up had a lot of rave reviews. They kept asking her to come back. That’s how we started our pop-up as a monthly event. We began to build our brand.
You essentially became a chef from of pure passion and persistence and now you have your own very successful restaurant. What are your goals going forward?
Tony: For me, from day one, I think my goal and dream hasn’t changed because I really want to represent what is Taiwanese food. I really hope one day when I hear people say, “Oh Taiwanese food I know is Buddha Jumps the Wall Soup 佛跳牆 fuotiaoqiang. I know it’s all kinds of food, it’s not only street food.” I really want to slowly share a lot of Taiwanese styles, not only banquet food but also 酒家菜 jiou jia cai (beer house cuisine). That kind of Taiwanese cuisine is very hard to find outside of Taiwan.
I hope I can keep going and cooking and learn more Taiwanese food to share to local people. For me, I have a lot of chefs to whom I can ask questions and I can keep learning, reading old books, and seeing how people in the past take care when they cook. They use their heart when they’re cooking and I think that’s really beautiful. I hope I can keep going and to have this mindset while sharing my food with everyone.
Watch their feature, What defines Taiwanese food? ft. Good to Eat Dumplings, on TaiwanPlus
And their recent feature, this time on how they and other chefs keep Taiwan’s roadside banquet traditions alive!
Website: https://www.wearegoodtoeat.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goodtoeatdumplings/
Good To Eat is a women, queer, and immigrants owned and operated restaurant set out to define Taiwanese cuisine in America in our own terms. Inspired by the traditional Taiwanese roadside banquet, we believe in the importance of delivering craft, thoughtful food with the intention of connecting each other in the community.
We have been dedicated to presenting intentional and exquisite craft food while being accessible and down to earth. We source sustainable ingredients from local producers and farmers’ markets whenever possible. Our team cultivates relationship with leading Japanese sake breweries and collaborates with Taiwanese tea estates to bring carefully curated beverages to our dining room. Combined with our focus to share stories and history behind each dish, we look to provide an entire dining experience that both excites the taste buds and nourish the soul.
TaiwaneseAmerican.org Food Editor Tiffany Ran is a chef and writer based in Seattle, Washington. Her writing has been featured in Seattle Magazine, Vice Munchies, Goldthread, Seattle Weekly, Lucky Peach, and more. She runs a Taiwanese pop-up called Babalio Taiwanese Pop Up, showcasing lesser known dishes and aspects of Taiwanese cuisine. She is very passionate about tracing and contributing to the growing recognition of Taiwanese cuisine in the U.S.
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