NOSTALGIC MEETS SYMBOLIC
As interest in Taiwanese cuisine surges, its fried chicken meets the moment
Growing up, chef David Kuo and his brothers played video games in a converted garage in the family’s backyard in West Covina, California. Just outside, luffa gourds, garlic chives, sweet potato leaves and other crops beloved in Taiwan grew in his grandmother’s vegetable garden.
Yet Kuo’s father would often come home late from work with a bucket of Church’s fried chicken, and they would dig in as they wrestled pixelated figures on the screen.
The bony pieces were unlike the styles of fried chicken Kuo encountered at street vendor stalls on family visits to Taiwan: yan su ji, boneless popcorn chicken strewn with fried basil leaves, and da ji pai, butterflied boneless breast cutlets. Marinated in soy sauce, rice wine, often garlic and always fivespice powder, then coated with coarse sweet potato starch, fried and finished with a dusting of white pepper, Taiwanese fried chicken is typically served in paper bags, without any sauce, for easy on-the-go snacking.
At Kuo’s Los Angeles restaurant, Little Fatty, the poultry on the menu feels familiar, yet distinctive. In a nod to his Taiwanese roots, his American childhood and his fine-dining background, Kuo sells small, bone-in pieces of popcorn quail topped with fried basil, with spicy mayo for dipping.
“It symbolises Taiwanese cuisine, obviously, but for me, it brings back memories,” he said. “Eating something with bones in front of the TV was the ultimate fun.”
Interest in Taiwanese cooking is surging in the United States, with cookbooks that chronicle the cuisine dotting the horizon and new shops and pop-ups opening left and right.
A cultural tentpole, Taiwanese fried chicken is finding a wider audience of diners and selling out at restaurants in the process. The crispy, aromatic chicken, which often can be found popcorn-style at boba shops in the United States, is gaining its foothold in the American culinary landscape amid a fried-chicken fervour. Fastfood chains battle for the title of best crispy chicken sandwich. Korean fried chicken chains dot college campuses. Indian fried chicken sandwiches draw crowds and inspire spirited reviews in New York City.
Kuo is among a generation of Taiwanese-American chefs who are moulding this night-market fixture to fit their own upbringings and tastes. They’re tucking Taiwanese fried chicken into sandwiches and steamed buns, serving it atop sliced white bread with pickles and drenching it with sauces in acknowledgement of regional American specialities and their life experiences.
At Java Saga in Atlanta, Alvin Sun serves four different Taiwanese fried chicken sandwiches, the most popular of which is the A.B.C.: Southern-style coleslaw, sweet pickles, jalapeño-American cheese and habanero-mango sauce atop what he calls his Taiwan No.1 fried chicken cutlet. Customers love it, whether or not they have any concept of what Taiwanese fried chicken should be.
“As long as they have an interest in trying it, they do seem to like it,” Sun said.
EATING SOMETHING WITH BONES IN FRONT OF THE TV WAS THE ULTIMATE FUN
Java Saga’s chicken recipe is well travelled and closely guarded. Sun adapted it from the one his mother and kitchen collaborator, Amy Lee, used to prepare hundreds of pounds of yan su ji for Atlanta’s Lunar New Year festival when he was in middle school. She, in turn, had adapted the recipe from a friend who owned a fried chicken business in Taichung, Taiwan.
It may be tempting to conclude that Taiwanese fried chicken evolved from Japanese fried chicken styles like karaage and katsu, given Japan’s colonisation of Taiwan from 1895 to 1945. But Taiwanese fried chicken’s history is quite contemporary, said Katy Huiwen Hung, a co-author of A Culinary History Of Taipei.
Yan su ji dates back to the night markets of the 1970s, around the time the Taiwanese chain TKK Fried Chicken, modelled after Southern-style chicken joints, was founded.
As fried chicken’s prominence in the country’s urban dining scene grew in the 1980s, American chains like KFC proliferated across Taiwan. Da ji pai didn’t become a popular street food until the 1990s.
“Spaghetti, fried chicken and pizza were the sort of things that young Taiwanese people go out for, like a treat,” Hung said.
Traditionally, Taiwanese fried chicken is not dipped in a wet batter, and according to some TaiwaneseAmerican chefs, it’s not Taiwanese fried chicken if it’s not lightly coated with sweet-potato starch, which creates an irresistibly crackly crust. And signature to the popcorn chicken style are those deeply jade crystalline shards of fried basil that garnish the bitesize pieces.
Many of today’s Taiwanese-American chefs are eager to individualise their yan su ji and dai ji pan while evoking nostalgia for the classics. Eric Sze, the chef and an owner of 886 and WenWen in New York City, does so in a few ways.
There’s the popcorn chicken drenched in a hot-honey glaze at both restaurants, and the Notorious TFC sandwich at 886: a da ji pai-style breast on a toasted sesame seed bun (inspired by the 2000 debut of a fried chicken sandwich at a Taipei McDonald’s) with pickled daikon and carrot (a hat tip to a vegetable condiment at the Vietnamese restaurant Madame Vo, in the East Village of Manhattan), and a housemade sea mountain sauce (a tomato-y condiment served with oyster omelettes in Taiwan).
And then there’s the BDSM (brined, deboned, soy milk) fried chicken at WenWen, which opened in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighbourhood in March. The elaborate sharing plate defies convention. It’s a whole young hen with its feet intact, dredged in an airy, wet batter of whipped silken tofu, soy milk and sweet potato starch that forms a brittle, light crust. The deep-fried bird is sliced into crispy strips for easy eating.
This moment is especially meaningful to chefs like Katie Liu-Sung, who has been cooking professionally since she was 16. Her first job was at a Church’s Chicken in Taichung, Taiwan, where she lived after spending her early childhood in Southern California. The Texas-born fried chicken chain had locations throughout Taiwan in the 1980s and 90s, and she worked at a couple of them over the years, following their formulas for frying chicken and baking biscuits.
Liu-Sung is now the chef and owner of Chewology, a Taiwanese restaurant in Kansas City, Missouri, that serves a classic rendition of popcorn chicken, as well as a steamed bun sandwich with Taiwanese fried chicken, cucumber pickles and chilli mayo.
“There’s no limitation to what we have to push out on the menu, and that is becoming a really inspiring thing,” Liu-Sung said. “If people are really accepting of that here, I think it’s really beautiful.”
One night this year, a woman walked into the restaurant and began tearing up. The smell of freshly fried Taiwanese fried chicken permeating the room made her emotional, she told Liu-Sung.
“Because it reminded her of home.”