By JOHN KRICHYILAN CITY, Taiwan -- The Chen family is preparing for the opening of what will be this provincial town's fanciest restaurant. Its name, Link, is appropriate: Three generations are working together to build on a culinary tradition begun with a single street stall. The presentation will be Western-style, with individual plating, rather than the usual shared bowls of Chinese fare. But much of the menu takes its inspiration from the family's Du Siao Yue, one of Taiwan's "hundred-year-old restaurants."
"It's the old dishes, deeply imprinted in memories, that catch people's stomachs," grandfa-ther Chen Ching-siang insists.
Chinese cuisine has long had its "century eggs," and in Taiwan the idea of the century res-taurant has gained popularity. It reflects the coming centennial of Sun Yat-sen's Republic of China -- the founding year, 1912, is still used as the starting point of official calendars in Taiwan -- and also asserts the value of an independent Taiwanese cuisine that long predates the 1949 arrival of the exiled Kuomintang regime and its more refined mainland tastes.
The Chinese term for these old establishments translates more literally as "100-year-old shops," and can extend to bakeries, cracker or meatball factories, single-dish noodle or soup purveyors, even tea or incense sellers. And, like the preserved eggs of similar name, many are not strictly centenarians; it's more an honorary designation, attached to a traditional establishment by local fame and government tourist authorities. Dating to unrecorded periods when the island was a remote and exceedingly humble outpost, the businesses began as simple stands. Their age is best measured not in years but in generations. (As for the preserved eggs, their age is best measured in weeks or months.)
Still, the old establishments do open a window on local history, cultures and tastes. Du Siao Yue roughly means "slack season," a reference to the need in bygone days for the likes of fishermen and farmers to have backup livelihoods for when there wasn't work in the fields or on the sea. For the Chens of Yilan, an agricultural area an hour's drive east of Taipei, that meant getting the early patent on silu pork, a tasty snack of noodle-like strands of meat and cabbage bathed in duck-egg yolks, and dougang, soft lard coated in a sugary batter, that on the restaurant's elaborate menu is now listed as "Yilan Minced Pork Cake."
"At the time my great-great-great grandfather started selling this," explains Joy Chen, who returned after graduation from college in the U.S. to carry on the business, "all people ate were sweet potatoes, and few trades were available because the Japanese didn't allow us to become educated." Taiwan was a Japanese colony from 1895 until 1945.
Now tour buses pull up to the family's two-story establishment, where nostalgic items are supplemented by luxury seafood like local abalone served on tender luffa gourd, scallop cakes or the exceptional butterfly shrimp deep-fried in a wrapping of sweet green onions, the Yilan area's best-known produce.
But the most famed hundred-year-old of all is another Tu Hsiao Yueh (same name, different Romanization), founded in Taiwan's most historic city, Tainan. Back in 1895, as legend has it, a fisherman named Hong began selling noodles out of portable pots hanging from a bamboo pole across his shoulders, a device called a Tantsi. Now Tantsi noodles (also rendered as "Danzai") are the "must" pasta for visitors to Tainan, where the restaurant has three branches (there are two more in Taipei).
The dish -- chewy noodles bathed in a meat sauce, made pleasingly tangy with vinegar and mashed garlic and topped with a bit of lively green onion and a single steamed shrimp -- is amazingly filling and perfectly balanced. Tu Hsiao Yueh also offers traditional plates like pig knuckles and grilled fish stomach (both a lot tastier than they sound).
Much of the old core of Tainan, Taiwan's capital from 1661 to 1887, is a veritable food museum. Many open-fronted food shops along the pleasantly arcaded Guohua Street can lay claim to a long lineage. Many other lunch eateries worth tasting can be found just blocks away in the city's oldest covered market. (It would take weeks to trace all the Tainan specialties found there, from crunchy shrimp rolls to "coffin boards" -- thickened soup poured onto Western toast.)
Another Tainan hole-in-the-wall is so storied that it has turned to same-day delivery of its singular food item, frozen and ready for steaming, to almost anywhere on the island. It has been in operation as Zai Fa Hao since 1872, during which time there has apparently been little opportunity to work on the decor, which is heavy on aluminum fan hoods and grimy tiles. But the hearty Zongzi -- steamed triangles of rice wrapped in bamboo leaf, a common treat across southern Chinese realms -- are justly celebrated for their rich stuffing of steamed meat, mushrooms, egg yolks and shrimp. A Tainan specialty of fish-paste dumplings in soup makes a fine accompaniment.
On the way north, many Taiwanese stop in Lugang, which was once Taiwan's main port and still boasts a brace of old, though unfortunately "improved," shophouses. Judging by the lines in front, most come to purchase the special buns and breads at A-Zen. Friendly owner T.K. Cheng, the seventh generation of Chengs in charge, boasts that "fillings of love and kindness" explain the lasting popularity of his light and gingery ground-pork Baozi. If not entirely worth an hour detour off Taiwan's main north-south highway or high-speed rails, the crisp cookies called "cow's tongues" (for their shape) are exceptional, as are the fresh Mantou rolls. With a daughter studying at Paris's Le Cordon Bleu culinary school, A-Zen promises to get even better under an eighth generation of Chengs.
In Taipei, the most reliable grazing grounds for "hundred-year" dishes is the old city, espe-cially the alleys surrounding the colorful Long Shan temple (but tourism-board recommen-dations led to gloppy oyster omeletts and a seemingly century-steeped bowl of chopped cuttlefish). Stretching the definition of "old" to make things more tasty, the alleys surrounding Taipei's main government buildings still contain eateries founded by those first apostles of mainland cooking who arrived in 1949 to cater to Kuomintang officials and troops in nearby dormitories.
One of the finest is the humble Longji, a mere 58 years in operation. From ham in tofu skin to rice cakes, the food honors the founding Zhu family's Zhejiang ancestry in a way that can hardly be found in Zhejiang anymore.
—John Krich is a writer based in Bangkok.
Reference：John Krich (NOVEMBER 6, 2009) THE WALL STREET JOURNAL