As a passionate home cook over the past few years, Eric Sim would often make giant stock pots of noodle soup with as many as 20 servings. Inevitably, he’d invite friends to help him finish. His niu rou mian, Taiwanese beef noodle soup, was always the biggest draw.
With its chewy noodles and earthy broth — heady with star anise, cloves and fennel — the dish has rightfully become one of Taiwan’s most famous culinary feats. Yet Sim, an Oakland native with family roots in Taiwan, couldn’t find a version that satisfied him close to home. It took a pandemic for him to follow his passion for cooking and start a pop-up, Yilan Foods, with three friends.
“I didn’t have too much Taiwanese culture around me growing up in Oakland,” he said. “It left me grasping for straws: How come I don’t know anyone who speaks Mandarin? How come I don’t see Taiwanese food around here?”
The pop-up specializes in just two dishes: niu rou mian and lou ru fan, a classic of braised pork belly over rice. Yilan’s version of niu rou mian is intensely rich, with meltingly tender beef shank and pickled mustard greens to lighten the dark, murky broth. It hasn’t taken long for the soup to find a following. Yilan served its first bowls in November — pre-orders only, with pickup or delivery in San Francisco and Oakland — and quickly sold out. With its limited weekly production of 100 servings of each dish, sell-outs became the norm.
In ways, Yilan Foods begins as a typical pandemic story: Sim’s friend Itthisak Rampaiyakul temporarily shut down his Oakland Thai restaurant Ninna in September and wasn’t sure what to do next. Rampaiyakul thought of Sim, a tech worker who dreamt of working in the food industry, and invited him to a meeting with two more friends, chef Alex Tong and business-minded Christopher Lam, to help bring a Taiwanese food pop-up to life.
Sim is the only Taiwanese person in the group. While he hasn’t found Taiwanese dishes to his liking in San Francisco, he acknowledges the stronger Taiwanese food options in cities like Cupertino, Fremont and Milpitas — they just feel unrealistically far from his apartment. He had a hunch other lovers of Taiwanese food in San Francisco would feel similarly.
Yilan Foods is named after the small northeastern Taiwan county where Sim’s mom is from. He thinks Yilan’s beef noodle soup stands out because of an infusion of French cooking technique, namely sauteing aromatics and blanching beef bones before bringing them together for an hours-long simmer. It comes with a fiery chile sauce spiked with Sichuan peppercorns — a non-traditional accompaniment but ultimately the sauce the team liked best.
For the lu rou fan, Sim wanted to serve a neat, “super presentable” version, with pops of color from pickled radish and crisp steamed vegetables, fluffy rice and a soft boiled egg marinated for 12 hours in pu-erh tea.
“We went with the big pork belly and mushroom chunks, because we wanted people to identify that we’re putting premium products in, not grinding everything up,” he said.
Yilan will start taking orders Wednesday for its next pop-up on Jan. 23, the first in several weeks after the founders took a break to think about the future.
Sim doesn’t want the menu to grow too much, but he foresees the addition of a vegetarian tofu version of lou ru fan and some side dishes. Instead of a huge menu, he wants to expand Yilan’s geographical reach with more pick up locations — he’s been fielding lots of requests from potential customers on the Peninsula. But Yilan would likely need to find a new commercial kitchen first — the pop-up is already outgrowing the capacities of Ninna.
Based on the pop-up’s early success, Sim wants to turn Yilan Foods in a brick-and-mortar restaurant, ideally in San Francisco, where he and his partners live and where he feels Taiwanese food is particularly lacking in options. If Yilan had its own space and didn’t have to rely on pre-orders and delivery — and thus having to make dishes that travel well — it could make other Taiwanese culinary hits like giant slabs of fried chicken or fried pork chop over rice. Still, expect Sim and the Yilan team to add their own touches.
“We wanted to stray away from the term ‘authentic,’” he said. “Everything we make is just us.”
Yilan Foods. Returning for Jan. 23 pre-orders; dishes cost $12-$14. Takeout and delivery in San Francisco and Oakland. yilan-foods.square.site
Janelle Bitker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: janelle.bitker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @janellebitker
The Link LonkJanuary 20, 2021 at 07:00PM
https://ift.tt/3qChYcx
New Bay Area pop-up is delivering on a Taiwanese classic: beef noodle soup - San Francisco Chronicle
https://ift.tt/2RxTDX4
Beef
No comments:
Post a Comment