- We had no intentions of elevating Taiwanese food,
or misrepresenting it.
- Our goal is to just purely to introduce
Taiwanese food in the city.
- We're just trying to respectfully
articulate our impression,
and you know, I feel a great responsibility to be careful
about that 'cause you know,
I'm also representing my business partner, Josh,
and he's lended an extreme amount of faith and trust in me
to do so, and you know we've been really lucky
with the neighborhood and how people have received it.
- We had met at a party,
maybe like seven or eight years ago,
and I didn't really have any experience with food service
but I did do this Taiwanese shaved ice pop-up
for summer with my mom, and I definitely had the bug in me,
I guess, so to speak,
and meeting Trigg was really a huge blessing in many ways.
- I mean we definitely empower each other.
I didn't think I was ready to open and operate
a restaurant, and certainly couldn't have even thought
about doing so without Josh.
We had a pretty simple goal, and that was to bring
our experiences eating Taiwanese food in Flushing
to our neighborhood in Brooklyn,
and cooking the food that we had been researching
and you know, eating so much.
- It kinda took us wanting to open this restaurant
for me to actually dive in more with Trigg
about learning about, you know, Taiwan,
its food, its political history.
- The Fly's Head was one of the first dishes
that we had.
It's a predominantly vegetable dish,
seasoned with little unctuous chunks of pork and pork fat,
and it's very balanced, you know, it's pungent,
there's a lot of garlic, chives,
and fermented black beans and chilis,
and it's a really nice dish.
We've learned that it has Szechuan roots,
but we experienced it at this Taiwanese restaurant,
so you know, that is just a good example of the cultural
melting pot or the culinary melting pot
that Taiwanese food can represent.
It's one of those dishes that taught us a lot.
- It's one of the dishes that I really wanted
to show off, that really just made me, you know,
think about things that I never thought about growing up.
When we go to Taiwan, my mom has pretty much been
on the receiving end of our arrival,
and we'd go to the market.
The first time she brought us there,
we had the o-a jian, which is the oyster omelet.
Just kind of arriving in a foreign place,
and having this almost foreign dish, you know,
in front of you, being so good and delicious,
it's just truly a great experience just to look back on.
You know, anytime, I think Trigg particularly,
liked the dish and wanted to do something with it.
- At the time when we opened,
you definitely didn't see oyster omelets
on any menus in the city.
So it was a fun dish for us to explore.
It's got pork in it, oysters,
so it's a sweet potato starch slurry, it's cheesy almost.
The textures and the flavors and even the gravy,
it's all very true to what we experienced in Taiwan,
and every time I make the oyster omelet
I think exactly about this lady that makes it,
on Guohua Street,
and you know, it's just one of those dishes that we do mimic
and channel that kind of memory every time,
so it's just a fun, meaningful dish for us.
- I first experienced danzi noodles,
in Tainan as well.
- Basically fishermen during typhoon season
started selling noodles,
and danzi refers to the shoulder stick,
like shoulder bowl noodles.
It's very easily recognizable,
it's a small bowl of noodles with a single shrimp on top.
The shrimp's used sparingly, as it was typhoon season,
it was hard to go fishing.
- A little bit of broth, not much,
maybe covering half of the noodles.
- Yeah. Yeah, it's not like a big bowl of ramen,
but it's definitely a brothy noodle dish.
I think, you know, soups and broths are one of the best
parts about cooking,
so it's definitely a little different
than the humbler version that you would have at a restaurant
in Tainan. Similar to the oyster omelet,
it has a deep nostalgic and historical connection to Tainan,
where Josh's mom's family's from,
so it's an important dish for us.
- It's just heavenly, it really makes me proud
of being from Taiwan.
- You know our first time in Taiwan,
I was trying to take in everything I possibly could.
- The first time we went,
it was all within the scope of spending time with my family,
and mostly to just experience and just be there.
I think us having that as the priority
really goes beyond any kind of food tour does,
'cause the focus is more about the feeling
and you know, the rest can come later.
- My goal is to really just connect and
understand Taiwanese food and its connection to the people,
and how the food is incorporated in everybody's
daily routine, and social culture,
and you know, me being the chef,
and having a prominently New American culinary background,
there's definitely going to be some creative license taken,
but we always prioritize contextualizing
the history of the dish,
or understanding that before we're taking it
in a different direction,
and building associations with the language
we use on the menu is important for us,
because when we opened, a lot of folks
would come in here and they would ask for pad Thai,
or, you know, had no idea what Taiwan was,
or maybe had heard of it,
nobody's trying to maliciously call us what we're not.
But, you know, in our minds,
if we can build associations with dishes on our menu,
and have people think, oh, that's Taiwanese,
then that's a small win for us,
because, you know, at the end of the day,
Taiwan and its political history is complex,
and, you know, if we can kinda promote
Taiwanese cultural and culinary identity,
you know, that's a success.