牛肉麵Taiwanese Beef Noodle Soup

Recipes vary by shop, but beef shank (often with tendon or brisket) is generally blanched or browned, then simmered for hours in beef-bone stock with ginger, scallion, garlic, soy sauce, rock sugar, star anise and other spices. Red-braised (紅燒) bowls get their depth and gentle heat from fermented chili bean paste (doubanjiang); clear-stewed (清燉) bowls skip the soy and chili and rely on beef bones (some shops add offal or vegetables), ginger and white pepper — sometimes Chinese herbs too — for a lighter, cleaner broth.

The meat is sliced over freshly cooked wheat noodles, ladled with hot broth and topped with chopped scallion and, usually, a spoonful of tangy pickled mustard greens. Many shops let you choose the noodle — wide, knife-cut, thin or hand-pulled — and chili oil sits on the table so you can set the heat yourself.

Taiwanese beef noodle soup is generally dated to the postwar years, with most accounts placing its emergence in the 1950s. Soldiers and civilians who relocated with the government around 1949 settled in military dependents' villages (眷村) and brought the flavors of their home provinces with them; the red-braised beef and chili bean paste of Sichuanese families is often singled out as the key influence. Before that, Taiwan's food culture was built around farming and rice, cattle were mostly working animals and beef was not widely eaten, so the noodle spread first within the mainlander community before becoming an everyday bowl for everyone.

Where the first bowl was served is contested. The writer Lu Yaodong (逯耀東) was among the first to argue that 'Sichuan-style' beef noodles were really a Taiwanese invention, possibly born in the air force dependents' villages of Gangshan in Kaohsiung, where a locally made chili bean paste was the key. Other accounts point to canned beef from US aid being added to noodles, or to Shandong veterans selling beef-offal noodles around Taipei Main Station, and the clear-stewed style is said to descend from Hui Muslim noodle traditions. Better documented is that by the mid-1950s Taipei's Taoyuan Street had a dozen or so shops advertising 'Sichuan-style' red-braised beef noodles, and that in 2005 the Taipei city government launched a beef noodle festival, with chefs competing for the best bowl, which helped push the dish's popularity to a peak. The city dropped the festival in 2015, and an industry association revived it in 2018.