Restaurant: Zhong Fu Yuan 種福園

By Meredith Dodge
STAFF REPORTER
Friday, Apr 15, 2005, Page 15

You can wrap up anything with jin bing. PHOTO: MEREDITH DODGE, TAIPEI TIMES

You can find beef noodles and potstickers on every corner in Taipei, but if you're looking for a more specialized sampling of northern cuisine, head to the corner of Yitong Street and Songjiang Road's Lane 123.

There you'll find Zhong Fu Yuan, a 22-year-old establishment offering a selection northern (or, more specifically, northeastern) Chinese dishes. The restaurant specializes in something that never gets old -- wrapping stuff up and eating it with your hands. The key element of this process is the jin bing (斤餅), which might be translated as "pound cake," though it's more like a chewy tortilla than that heavy pastry.

The jin bing are made in an area at the front of the restaurant surrounded by windows so you can observe the process. A ball of dough, dripping with vegetable oil, is pulled into a long snake and coiled around into a pile, then rolled flat and plopped on a greasy griddle. Once cooked, the jin bing is slapped around a bit to make it fluffier.

"Pretty much anything on our menu can be wrapped up in a jin bing," said Chang Kuchiang (章可強), one of Zhong Fu Yuan's managers. It's like the northerner's answer to white rice -- it goes with every dish. Two of the favorite things to put inside a jin bing, however, are shredded pork (or beef) stir-fried in sweet bean sauce (京醬肉絲) and vegetables covered with an egg blanket (合菜代瑁), containing mostly been sprouts.

Some other menu highlights are the beef soup, a savory broth with chunks of meet in the bottom, and the shredded chicken with lapi (雞絲拉皮). Lapi is best described as a broad, flat noodle made of mung bean flower. The dish comes smothered in a peanut sauce with a clump of wasabe on the side. Do not be afraid: The wasabe goes surprisingly well with this cold, mild dish -- provided you mix it in well enough.

With its selection of hard-to-find, traditional northern dishes, you'd think Zhong Fu Yuan would be run by a family from northern Chinese city. The restaurant's founder, Liu Xiu-xiong (劉秀雄), who now runs the branch on Huaining Street, fell in love with jin bing while a student in his native Keelung, where the only family making such things had a restaurant. Years later he opened a jin bing establishment of his own with the help of one of the chefs from that original restaurant.