Review: Why Taiwanese breakfast can be hard to find
Exploring a confused cultural border at a Monterey Park Chinese breakfast restaurant serving Taiwanese dishes that are actually Chinese flavors made famous in a Taipei neighborhood
REVIEW: Morning Summit 219 E Garvey Ave, Monterey Park, CA 91755
I was craving Taiwanese breakfast and met some friends at Morning Summit in Monterey Park.
It’s always pretty interesting seeing what people eat when they wake up, when their appetite wanes the lowest. Breakfasts, at least Asian breakfasts, tend to feature flavors and textures that wake the body but are least familiar to outsiders. Some are unlovely, utilitarian errands of nutrition, or portable, or big spreads for people with time and leisure. At times there is no firm border between what is breakfast and what is not.
Taiwanese breakfast can be an elusive concept in the San Gabriel Valley. It was probably easier to find back in the 1970’s when Monterey Park was full of Taiwanese people, and the city was marketed to wealthy immigrants as the Taiwanese Beverly Hills. But most of the population has relocated to places like Rowland Heights, Diamond Bar, Hacienda Heights and Chino, and Taiwanese food is harder to find.
At Morning Summit, we were the first customers for lunch, so the youtiao came fried fresh, crunching, then soft and chewy. We paired them with sweet and salty soy milks. The cold, sweetened version comes in a cup and has a mellow creaminess. You can also get it warm in a bowl as a sweet or savory porridge.
Lately, lots of places serve what they call Taiwanese breakfast dishes. And on the way to Morning Summit, I noticed a new Yung Ho Dou Jiang on Atlantic Boulevard, the name of a famous style of Taiwanese breakfast. As a kid my parents used to take us to restaurants with that name, trying to find flavors that matched their memories.
But I can’t be sure if it’s a new Yung Ho Dou Jiang because there are so many restaurants with some variation of that name. In popular usage, it refers to the menu of soy milk, youtiao, and flaky breads popularized by food stands in Taipei’s Yonghe district. But so many chefs have moved around since the pandemic and owners rebrand. Everyone seems to romanize the name, 永和, in different ways, confusing things further.
Actually I’m not even sure whether Yong Ho Dou Jiang or Morning Summit are Taiwanese places. Dishes like jianbing and rice porridge are served across China and the diaspora. But this menu of foods is often marketed as Yong Ho Dou Jiang or Taiwanese regardless of whether Taiwanese people are involved, because of the name recognition.
This also happened with Din Tai Fung and soup dumplings, a dish originating from Shanghai that most people associate with Taiwan. These versions of Chinese food spread as Taiwan’s economy saw record growth rates amid a worldwide explosion of international trade.
At the time Taiwan’s ruling party had a political interest in popularizing Taiwanese versions of Chinese food. After the Communist party took over mainland China, the newly deposed Kuomintang officials fled to Taiwan and tried to build a reputation as the official stewards of true Chinese culture.
Taipei’s Yonghe district shares a name with several Chinese regions and towns, as well as historical periods. And it was once common practice for Taiwanese roads and neighborhoods to bear Chinese place names.
After Taiwan passed from Japanese hands to Chinese in 1945, Taipei’s streets and districts were renamed to mirror China’s geography. Kuomintang officials fled to Taiwan after losing to Communist forces and tried to continue diplomatic relations as representatives of China. Apparently even the nomenclature of their new national capital had to testify to the legitimacy of their claim as the true governmental seat.
Yong Ho Dou Jiang started as a longing for hometown breakfasts. KMT veterans and refugees, many of whom were from northern China, launched several restaurants in Taipei’s Yonghe district. The stands found early success because their opening hours happened to coincide with the broadcast hours of the Taiwanese Little League Team, which at the time was dominating teams around the world. After Yonghe doujiang became famous around the world, copycats proliferated.
All of this aspirational, politicized place-making has left a lot of people, including myself, confused about the differences between Chinese and Taiwanese food and restaurants. But they are indeed significant, and you can read about them in the riveting and deeply researched book “Made in Taiwan,” by Clarissa Wei and Ivy Chen.
(I find that if you Google Clarissa’s name and any Chinese or Taiwanese food, there’s a pretty good chance she has written an article about it. The same goes for Kristie Hang and San Gabriel Valley restaurants - I found out about Morning Summit in her Instagram Reels)
So we’ve established that Morning Summit, definitively, is not a Taiwanese restaurant. Probably.
Morning Summit is run by non-Taiwanese Mandarin-speaking people, and the menu had dishes like roujiamo, which is a Shaanxi province specialty. The employees’ accents, to my ear, matched the roujiamo better. But the roujiamo was served with pickled mustard greens, which I know as Taiwanese.
It turns out that this jumbling happens a lot in the San Gabriel Valley, according to Kristie, who I called seeking some clarity. She pointed out that chefs and restaurant owners aren’t just making the food of their hometowns anymore. They’re trying to cater to an area whose tastes have been shaped by multiple waves of Chinese immigration from all over the global Chinese diaspora.
“They’re trying to sell a product,” Hang said. “Taiwanese and Hong Kong breakfasts might just be what’s in right now.”
I reached out to Clarissa, who told me that what is popularly known as Taiwanese breakfast in the San Gabriel Valley is mostly northern Chinese food.
It’s a “niche subset of breakfast in Taiwan. And it's also very Chinese,” she said. “Most people in Taiwan tend to frequent 美而美-style breakfast shops, with hamburgers and dan bing and sweet ice tea,” said Clarissa (美而美: mei er mei, a type of modern snack/breakfast shop in Taiwan)
So to summarize: Morning Summit is not a Taiwanese breakfast place, but it serves Taiwanese breakfast dishes, many of which are northern Chinese dishes. Restaurants identifying as Taiwanese but serving northern Chinese dishes aren’t uncommon in the SGV, and it’s possible they’re just following a trend.
That’s a taste of how complicated it can be to characterize Chinese identity in the San Gabriel Valley, a majority-minority region of more than 2 million people, largely Asians and Latinos, east of east Los Angeles. It’s what makes the concept of Taiwanese breakfast elusive here.
Do you mean made by Taiwanese people, or Taiwanese flavors, or Taiwanese dishes? Each question might have a different answer. And when you consider all of the different indigenous cultures on Taiwan that could be called Taiwanese, which I’ve failed to do so here, it gets even more complex.
I don’t mind if a northern Chinese immigrant is trying to sell Taiwanese food in Monterey Park. But eating Taiwanese food by Taiwanese people is important to my mom. Perhaps as a response to the confused popular nomenclature of Taiwanese food, she can be exacting about which flavors are actually Taiwanese.
When we lived together in Los Angeles, I would take her to my favorite Taiwanese places and invariably she’d swear she could taste the Chinese cooking. Never mind that this was Southern California, and the cooks were probably Latino. Once, she refused to eat her dan dan mian and we had to go to a second restaurant. At Ranch 99, she shops according to which products are identifiably Taiwanese.
But history sheds some light on my mom’s stubborn palate. She grew up at a time when the government was trying to reproduce diverse regional Chinese cultures in Taiwanese society. Her family in Taiwan goes back six generations. Their history has been defined by external forces trying to rewrite Taiwanese identity to suit some political aim, whether it was the Chinese, the Dutch or the Japanese.
The imperial Japanese government sought to remake Taiwan into a model colony as proof of its ascendance to global power. So the Taiwanese pantry incorporated more sugar, a Japanese style of soy sauce and rice vinegar, and my grandmother came to prefer sushi for nice meals.
The nationalist Chinese forces tried to rule Taiwan as the official government seat of China. So displaced Chinese veterans and refugees from Sichuan, Shandong and Shanghai recreated their hometown cuisines, which mingled with ingredients and techniques from Taiwan’s indigenous Austronesian people and created something unique and hard to label. And I grew up confused about what was Taiwanese, because my mom kept telling me all Chinese food was Taiwanese (with historical context, a logical claim!).
In Taiwan you’ll find a lot of people with many ideas about what being Taiwanese is. I think being Taiwanese, like any identity, is the pull and tangle of all of these opposing forces. Not a fixed factual state, but something that can only be perceived if you engage in sustained, active interpretation.
So with all that in mind, I can confidently report to you that Morning Summit might actually be a Taiwanese restaurant. Wait. No it’s not.
We also ordered danbing were large, flat, soft and chewy rather than the flaky, light kind and more conical type I prefer. That could be a measure of the omelette’s quality, or simply an indication of a regional style. The pork baozi were delicious and made fresh to order. And one interesting thing I’ve never had was a steamed bun that appeared to be a lump of corn meal formed into a hollow conical teardrop. It tasted like a tamale steamed outside of a husk - crumbly with a mild sweetness, but a bit dry with no filling.
If you go, be careful of the English translations - one dish appears to label fennel as dill.
Excited for my debut as Frank's food photographer 🤣