The politics of bubble tea: at last, Taiwanese food is getting the recognition it deserves
It always warrants a double take. This time, I was in Malmö, Sweden, admiring the cobblestone pavement and enjoying the cool, crisp weather, when the sign came into view: “Yi Fang Taiwan Fruit Tea” it said, next to a line of Chinese script. I recognised the brand immediately. Yi Fang is a Taiwanese bubble tea chain with outposts in more than a dozen countries across the world – it’s a store I have seen multiple times around the block in Taipei where I live.
It may not be as surprising to discover such a shop in Sweden today as it would have been 10 years ago but, as a Taiwanese American food writer, I couldn’t help but think about the remarkable globalisation of my island’s cuisine. I also made a mental note that if I needed a hug from home, an ice-cold cup of bubble tea would be within easy reach.
From bubble tea to baos, Taiwanese dishes can now be found in all corners of the world. Still, Taiwanese food is often lumped under the broad umbrella of Chinese cuisine – or even occasionally confused with Thai food.
Because it belongs to an island nation whose right to sovereignty is contested (China claims it as part of its territory), Taiwanese food has long struggled to define itself on the international stage; it has been something of an underdog, misunderstood in part because of the constantly evolving nature of Taiwanese identity. In fact, Taiwanese cuisine has been making a splash since the 20th century – covertly. In those early days, none of the dishes coming out of the island were officially considered Taiwanese. From 1949 to 1987, Taiwan was a single-party dictatorship governed by the Kuomintang, Chinese nationalists who considered themselves the sole ruler of all of China. This meant dishes such as General Tso’s chicken, delectable chunks of boneless fried chicken coated in a sweet and savoury sauce – invented in Taipei by a Hunanese chef – were classified as Chinese. At that time, the island advertised itself as a hub of regional Chinese cookery. The celebrity chef Fu Pei-mei, considered by many to be the Julia Child of Chinese cookery, was sent by the Taiwanese government to the US, Japan and Hong Kong as an ambassador for Chinese cuisine.
It wasn’t until Taiwan transitioned into a democracy in the late 80s and 90s that Taiwanese food became a category unto itself. This was a particularly welcome development because food from the island has its own qualities that distinguish it from that of China. For example, the soy sauce, rice wine and rice vinegars of Taiwan are made with Japanese-era recipes, a legacy of Japanese colonial rule. The flavours are also generally sweeter across the board.
The first type of shops to openly embrace “Taiwan” in their branding specialised in bubble tea, AKA boba – a cold, refreshing beverage that arose out of tea shops in Taiwan in the late 1980s. In Los Angeles, where I grew up, the early boba stores in the late 90s were chains (Ten Ren’s Tea andQuickly) headquartered in Taiwan. These brands not only provided the diaspora with comforting tall cups of chewy tapioca pearls swimming in ice cold milk tea, but were outposts of Taiwanese youth culture. Many of them blared bubblegum pop songs from the island, had the latest music videos on repeat on a TV in the corner, and were stocked with shelves of up-to-date Taiwanese comic books and magazines.
A decade later, in the late 2000 and early 2010s, vendors selling gua baos – sometimes known monosyllabically as baos – began to sprout up in cities around the world, proudly extolling their Taiwanese roots. In New York City, the attorney turned chef turned TV personality Eddie Huang opened Baohaus in 2009 and captivated the east coast food literati with bite-size braised pork belly slabs nestled inside fluffy white wheat buns. A couple of years later, in 2012, a Taiwanese street food stand named Bao opened up in a Hackney car park to much acclaim and eventually graduated to a brickand-mortar restaurant with multiple locations around London – kicking off the Taiwanese food boom in the UK. I had just graduated from college around this time and was working as a food writer in New York City when I began to hear from assigning editors and my peers that Taiwanese food was “having a moment”.
But while its popularity abroad might have seemed organic, this coincided with a series of carefully crafted soft power initiatives by the Taiwanese government. In 2005, the Taipei City government began hosting a beef noodle soup festival to bring international awareness to this dish – once an obscure recipe shunned by the majority of Taiwanese people (beef was taboo until the late 20th century). And in 2010, as part of an economic stimulus plan, Taiwan’s executive branch approved a TND1.1bn (£27.5m) budget to put Taiwanese cuisine on the global map – hosting international food festivals and sending Taiwanese chefs to events abroad to promote dishes such as stinky tofu and oyster omelette.
Today, there are a healthy crop of Taiwanese restaurants, influencers and chefs all over the world serving up much more than just boba and baos. In New York City, there’s an eatery in the East Village called 886 with plates inspired by the dishes commonly served at modern beer restaurants across Taipei; they dole out a stirfry with beef coated in an aromatic shacha sauce, a popular Taiwanese condiment made witha special blend of dried olive flounder fish, garlic, shallots and chilli. Where I grew up in LA, there’s a mom-and-pop eatery called Sinbala that does Taiwanese-style sausages (sweeter, usually served with a side of raw garlic). And in London, my friend Tiffany Chang has put on soldout pop-up lunches featuring dishes unique to the island, such as shredded turkey over rice, milk tea shaved ice, and nuggets made out of pork and fish paste plopped in a thick, savoury soup.
“It’s wonderful that people in the UK are now more aware of Taiwan and Taiwanese food,” says Chang, who is planning to host an event centred just on beef noodle soup. “I haven’t had to answer the question, ‘You mean Thai food?’ as often as I have in the past.”
Clarissa Wei is the author of Made in Taiwan: Recipes and Stories from the Island Nation