How The Lime Stand Recreated Taiwan’s Most Unique Dessert in Portland

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Taiwan’s enigmatic peanut ice cream roll is a delicious, but also befuddling mix of taro, pineapple, and peanut ice cream, thin shavings of peanut brittle, and…cilantro (?!) wrapped in a thin spring roll-style wrapper called run bing. You might have seen it on social media with reels highlighting Taiwan’s night markets, or more recently, in reels about a small shop in Portland, Oregon serving peanut ice cream rolls to a long line of fans. When Jimmy Ma had the idea to recreate this quirky…

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Shared Meals, Fieldwork, Storytelling: Building Transnational Solidarity Through the Taiwan Food and Farm Delegation

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For many in diaspora, food is one of the most tangible threads connecting us to ancestry, memory, and land. Yet the pathways that sustain those connections—seed to harvest, recipe to ritual—are often complicated or even fractured by displacement, colonization, and distance.  It is along these fractured, but fertile, lines that Taiwanese American community organizers Li Schmidt and Kimberly Chou Tsun An have envisioned and built the Taiwan Food and Farm Delegation, a pilot project uniting…

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“Like a Box of Chocolates”: Formosa Chocolates’ Kimberly Yang Talks About a Life That Led Her to Chocolate Making

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If life were like a box of chocolates, one could only hope it would be a box of Formosa Chocolates; each, a veritable jewel box of brightly colored chocolate bon bons with flavors like coconut caramel, passionfruit, or a surprising membrillo yogurt. Its founder Kimberly Yang is a psychiatrist-turned-chocolatier and her boxes of bon bons are a diverse and adventurous assortment. Today, she produces chocolates out of her commissary kitchen in San Rafael, California. The variety evolves and changes,…

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Good to Eat Owners Look Back (and Ahead) at Eight Years of Sharing Taiwanese Cuisine

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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…

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Preserving a Slice of Taiwan’s Culinary History: Meet Rich and X Wang of Chicago’s Minyoli Taiwanese Noodles 民有里台灣麵館

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Before Minyoli became a Taiwanese restaurant in Chicago’s Andersonville neighborhood, it was the name of the military dependents' village where chef Rich Wang and his family had resided for decades. In 1949, the Kuomintang government established hundreds of these villages called juan cun 眷村, to house KMT military personnel and their families who fled to Taiwan after the Chinese Civil War. Wang grew up in the Minyoli juan cun for the first nine years of his life before life in the village became…

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From “幾乎沒有 Basically Nothing,” Pop-Up Chef James Chang Defines Taiwanese American Cuisine in Kansas City

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[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="1440"] Photo provided by James Chang[/caption] Chef James Chang was perusing the aisle at the Pan Asian Supermarket in Overland Park, Kansas when I spoke with him. Along the way, he picked up soy paste, oyster sauce, black vinegar, rice wine, ChingKiang vinegar. These were items for his upcoming pop-up and a collaboration dinner he was planning for the following week. Chang grew up in Taiwan and Southern California, then moved to Kansas City where he made…

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“Baking is working, right?”: Meet Baker Cat Cheng, from Netflix’s “Blue Ribbon Baking Championship”

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Baker Cat Cheng of Cat’s Bakes on Discovering a Her New Talent and Chasing the Blue Ribbon Cat Cheng became a music teacher straight out of college, but found herself struggling to continue down that path despite devoting much of her life to the craft. When COVID hit, she, like many, took to baking as a hobby and a distraction. But her skills quickly flourished and she saw the potential for baking to become a small business. Within a few short years, she launched Cat’s Bakes, a home baking business,…

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 Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food

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Introduction by Cathy Erway for TaiwaneseAmerican.org You can always tell the books that have been enjoyed the most by how damaged they are. Those books have been on adventures: Maybe you took them to the beach and clogged up their spines with sand. Maybe you rounded their edges from banging them around in your tote bag for weeks.  In the case of Pei Mei’s Chinese Cook Book Volume I, a copy of which sits in my parents’ bookshelf, the wear and tear is evident. A constant sight for as long…

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A True Family Business: Jessica Wang of Gu Grocery in conversation with Tiffany Ran

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I thought I first met Jessica Wang and her mother, who lovingly goes by the name Mama Peggy, at the LA River Farmers Market a few years ago. But looking back in my shoebox of old photos from high school, I dug out a picture of my friends enjoying a park picnic and there she was. My friend had asked to bring along a family friend that day. We'd all enjoyed a day at the park and I hadn’t seen her since. That is, until the day at the LA River Farmers Market so many years later, when we started chatting…

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Taiwanese Soy Milk & My Transnational Story of Migration

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BY ZIXUAN LIU / Feature Photo Credit: https://elizbeartravel.com/ From Yonghe District, New Taipei, to Shenyang, Manchuria, Bottled in 99 Ranch Markets During my first twelve years of growing up in the former capital of the Qing Dynasty, Mukden, now called Shenyang in PRC, I never skipped breakfast. For most of my childhood, my mother always took me to this one breakfast shop called “Yong-he Dou-jiang”, a chain in China that solely served Chinese breakfast foods for all meals. We always…

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