KQED’s Eating Taiwanese in the Bay
is a series of stories exploring Taiwanese food culture in all of its glorious, delicious complexity. New installments to the series will run daily from May 19–28.
If you ask a Taiwanese American about the Bay Area’s Taiwanese food scene, chances are they’ll complain about how hard it is to find stinky tofu or savory soy milk or a decent bowl of beef noodle soup. And it’s true: This isn’t exactly the San Gabriel Valley. But it s also true that anyone who knocks the Bay Area s Taiwanese food community probably hasn’t spent a lot of time in suburban enclaves like Fremont and Cupertino, where there’s big enough of a Taiwanese market that even niche restaurants specializing in sweet potato congee or Taiwanese breakfast sandwiches can survive and thrive. They also probably haven’t paid attention to the new wave of pop-ups that are bringing Taiwanese food into the mainstream in Oakland and San Francisco.
KQED s Eating Taiwanese in the Bay
is a series of stories exploring Taiwanese food culture in all of its glorious, delicious complexity. New installments to the series will run daily from May 19–28.
A
cross from a few sheep bleating and baaing behind a fence, rainbow pride and Black Lives Matter flags softly wave in the wind. A “Stop Asian Hate” poster is propped against a wall. Around the corner, the property opens up to a 1.5-acre farm filled with trellises of bitter melon, rows of napa cabbage, and hoophouses holding dozens of other Asian herbs and vegetables. All signs, perhaps, that this is a farm with a strong sense of its own identity.
KQED s Eating Taiwanese in the Bay
is a series of stories exploring Taiwanese food culture in all of its glorious, delicious complexity. New installments to the series will run daily from May 19–28.
I grew up as the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants first in San Jose, and later in a South Bay suburb clocked as having only a 5.1% Asian population in 1990, when I was in elementary school. Other Asian American students were rare, and Taiwanese American students were even rarer; there were no Taiwanese American kids in my day-to-day life, as far as I knew.
Taiwanese cuisine, on the other hand, remained a large part of my childhood. At home I ate light meals of vegetables and fish, with little oil, cooked by my mother. On weekends, my family went to Marina Foods or Ranch 99 for groceries after lunch at Cupertino Village, a mostly Asian shopping and restaurant center where we’d feast on soup dumplings and beef noodle soup, leaf-wrapped zhongzi and spicy string beans limp on