Night market
- Taipei
- Daily 16:00–00:00
Known forTaiwanese Fried Chicken · Oyster Omelet · Scallion Pancake
In the kitchen
How it’s prepared
The traditional method is to cut chicken breast or thigh into small pieces, marinate it in soy sauce, sugar, rice wine, garlic and five-spice powder, then coat it in flour or sweet potato starch (some stalls dip it in egg first) and deep-fry until golden. Some vendors are said to use two pots of oil at different temperatures, a hot one to crisp the crust and a cooler one to finish cooking without drying the meat out.
The signature move comes at the end. At many stalls a handful of basil leaves goes into the hot oil for a few seconds just before the chicken comes out, then everything is drained and shaken with pepper-salt, plus chili powder if you ask, and sold in a paper bag with bamboo skewers. A stall rarely sells only chicken: you choose king oyster mushrooms, broccoli, green beans, pig's blood cake, squid-paste balls and other items from the display, and the vendor fries your selection to order.
Origins
History and origins
Taiwanese fried chicken is a fairly recent street food, and most accounts place its appearance in the 1970s without agreeing on a date. A frequently told account links it to the arrival of American-style fried chicken: according to its own history page, TKK (頂呱呱), Taiwan's first fried chicken chain, opened its first shop in Ximending, Taipei, on 20 July 1974. The founders of the Tainan shop Youai (友愛鹽酥雞), as relayed in a 2009 newspaper report, say they saw the American-style craze but found a whole piece of chicken awkward to tear apart by hand, so they cut chicken into small pieces, marinated and fried it so it could be eaten with a bamboo skewer, and shook pepper-salt and chili powder over it. That became the Taiwanese version.
Who opened the first stall is disputed. A Ximending business called Taiwan Number One Salt-Crispy Chicken (台灣第一家鹽酥雞) says on its own website, as relayed by ETtoday, that its founder, Chen Ting-chih (陳廷智), set up the first stall there in 1975. A 2009 Liberty Times report dates Youai to 1979 and says a student food club considered it likely to be the first. Chinese Wikipedia adds a 1970 formula from a Ximending restaurant operator, drawn from a newspaper archive, and cites a 1987 newspaper for the 1975 Ximending claim. These accounts come mainly from the businesses themselves or from press reports, with no independent documents we could check, and old shops across the island claim to be the original; a 2022 FoodNEXT industry report likewise calls the dish a product with several origins whose first brand is hard to trace. Even the name is unsettled: signs say either 鹽酥雞 or 鹹酥雞, and the Ministry of Education's Taiwanese dictionary lists 鹹酥雞.
