Amanda Saxton visits the Taiwanese street food joint has grown from food stall to franchise.
Kai Eatery is best known for its juicy, face-sized fried chicken breasts, but I'm here to rhapsodise over what should be dubbed the Taiwanese Happy Meal. It is also a burger (of sorts), fries and a drink, but a million times more interesting than anything from old McD's. It's what you might eat when wandering the street food markets of Taipei.
Standing in for a hamburger is the gua bao (pronounced "gwa bow"). These perfectly pillowy steamed buns taste best overflowing with pork belly, pickles, crushed peanuts, and cucumber (the Taipei, $10.50). So many textures and flavours galore, biting into one is deeply satisfying. Kai Eatery's fries are cut from orange Beauregard kumara ($8) — the same type used in Taiwan — and taste uncannily sweet. This is because, instead of salt, they're coated in powdered plum. Embrace them as a dessert, I say! Custardy interiors contrast beautifully with crispy casings. Your drink will be milky bubble tea ($7.50), equipped with an extra-wide straw for sucking up tapioca pearls (the bubbles). My go-to flavour is brown sugar, but matcha, taro, and dreamy egg pudding are great too. Everything is very takeaway friendly.
The picture atop Kai Eatery's sturdy gua bao boxes pleases me greatly. What looks to be a dead bear is draped between the jaws of a bao, next to the words "no pain, no gain". At first, I took it as a refreshingly blunt characterisation of meat eating: animals die, which is sad, but boy are they delicious.
The eatery's owner Allen Yeh, who is simultaneously a pharmacist, says this is not the message he's trying to get across. The bear, a Formosan Black — endemic to Taiwan, named 'Formosa' by Portuguese sailors — is in fact sleeping (there are in fact three tell-tale Zs). And 'no pain, no gain' is a Taiwanese mantra adopted by those who fled mainland China for the island after defeat by the Communist Party in 1949. "Those guys started from scratch and made Taiwan a very prosperous place, so we've made it our mantra too," 37-year-old Yeh explains. The snoozing bear is a cheeky acknowledgement that even the hardest workers have to sleep sometimes.
