Familiar Face, Familiar Place, Familiar Taste: Granny Tsai's Dessert Diner

Anyone who has not frequented the Snake Alley night market for a spell would be well advised to ask beforehand about directions to her shop; otherwise you'll be hard pressed to find it. The covered night market, which starts from Kuangchou Street, consists of adjoining shops offering items such as fresh seafood, herbal angelica pig feet soup, minced pork over rice and so forth. When you clear Kuilin Road, almost to Kuiyang Street, the sky reappears (signaling the edge of the market). Taking a stroll along this stretch of road will certainly be worth your while.

A couple of years ago Granny Tsai reopened her shop, complete with radiant lights and plenty of space. The light boxes ornamented with retro images of Wanhua hanging on the wall are not only distinctive decorations; they also give tourists insight into Wanhua's former grandeur. The recently designed "Granny Tsai's Desserts" shop sign conveys a classy elegance, courting popularity for the Good Neighbor Foundation's business renewal plan.

"Granny Tsai's" red bean, peanut and salty dumpling soups warm the tummies of night market visitors.

Quaint homemade flavor

While owner Ke Te-lung, a goat-bearded middle-aged man, attends to customers at the front of the shop, his wife is off to the side deftly wrapping salty dumplings and sesame seed dumplings, loading glutinous rice wrappers with a mushroom, red onion and minced pork filling. Before presenting the dumplings to customers, she places them into boiling water, followed by blanched vegetables and soup stock. Each steaming-hot bite is fresh and flavorful.

Some of Granny Tsai's soup specialties are: sweet peanut soup, sweet red bean soup, sweet steamed rice porridge and sugared white wood ear with lotus seed soup--all made from scratch. The trick to making delectable dumplings--whether using long-grain or round glutinous rice--lies in carefully adjusting the water-to-rice ratio according to humidity levels. If it's too dry out, the dumplings will crack open. If it's too humid, however, they will turn out too soft. To boot, slow-simmered longan porridge requires scrupulous stirring, taking care that the rice isn't boiled to the point of splitting. Next, both brown and white sugar are mixed in until the porridge becomes amber-colored, giving it a robustly sweet fragrance. Sweet porridge as handsome and tasty as this is hard to come by on the bustling streets of Taipei.

Their publicly acclaimed sweet peanut soup calls for Ilan sandlot peanuts to be boiled for eight hours. Frequent customers like to eat their sweet soup with either twisted crullers or crispy shortbread. Out in front of the shop, loyal customers praise it for being the only shop in Taipei to offer sweet peanut soup with such mouth-melting taste. Try it with twisted crullers for an even more authentic and nostalgic flavor.

"Granny Tsai's" red bean, peanut and salty dumpling soups warm the tummies of night market visitors.

Wanhua of old

The second-generation owner of Granny Tsai's uniquely aglow and spacious shop has a much more cultured air than his night market contemporaries. After growing up in this area, Ke left to find work as he came of age, then returned after retirement to care for his aging parents. Though he recalls leading a complete childhood there, the unsavory images of the profusion of vagrants and prostitutes left him with mixed emotions about Snake Alley.

At the end of 2001, his mother had joint replacement surgery on an ailing leg. Also, the finance industry, in which he was employed, was phasing in mergers and phasing out employees. That's when he decided to take early retirement from his banking job of 20 years and return home to care for his parents. It didn't take long for him to learn the ins and outs of the family dessert business. Still, he couldn't get past the blighted environment of the surrounding market.

Reflecting on the ups and downs of Wanhua from the past half-century, he speaks of how Huachiang Bridge first opened to vehicular traffic back in 1968. To facilitate traffic flow between Taipei and Panchiao, the city government broadened Heping West Road Section 3, displacing the street vendors that were around Wanhua Theater. At that time, with the exception of public housing, all other homes in that area were laid out as business arcades. The displaced street vendors ended up blocking access to existing businesses.

In 1987 the locals drafted a plan to build a steel-frame canopy which would extend out over the road as well as a Chinese-style monumental archway right at the street entrance, making it a fancy spot at the time. However, the Ke family was living in the northern section of shops which were constructed of wood, so in light of family safety concerns they declined taking part in the steel-frame project.

Sometime thereafter, the engineering works to move the western mainline railroad underground cut off eastbound and westbound traffic through Wanhua. The area's businesses gradually fell into decline. After animal protection laws were enacted in 2000, vendors in Snake Alley were no longer able to advertise themselves with signs reading "snakes slaughtered on the spot." Then in 2001, after prostitution was outlawed, Snake Alley lost much of the foot traffic on which it had depended, making it difficult for people to continue making a living there.

"Granny Tsai's" red bean, peanut and salty dumpling soups warm the tummies of night market visitors.

Creating good times

Upon his return, Ke discovered shops out of business with the lights out that were being used as parking spaces. The canopy along the street was dilapidated, its gutters were rusted out and stalls with muddy piles of junk on them were on the verge of collapse. Some vendors simply could not continue doing business so they rented their shops out to karaoke businesses, making the neighborhood very noisy. The place was a mess.

Even though government agencies had been implementing neighborhood renewal, environmental transformation and business district development initiatives left and right, Snake Alley was overlooked and remained in a state of disrepair. In 2002, Taipei's Bureau of Urban Development put forth a traffic-free zone plan for Kuangchou Street. Of his own accord, Ke asked the bureau if his house could be included in the program. He also took the occasion to persuade neighboring vendors to have their dilapidated canopies replaced.

In 2003, however, SARS descended upon Taiwan, nearly ruining Ke's plans. Snake Alley was designated an infected area, causing the streets to become deserted and almost causing him to desert the dessert diner. Fortunately, the SARS epidemic ended within three months. As well, the shop received a NT$200,000 grant through a Good Neighbor Foundation endowment program. On the advice of a consulting firm, Ke himself spent NT$250,000 to have his oil-stained ceramic tile countertops torn out and replaced with low-maintenance steel ones. He also formed a decent-looking stall out of one he already had, combined with two that were discarded by his father. Some wooden tables and chairs top things off, making it a cozy and relaxing place to enjoy the delicious food. Hanging above the stall are wooden signs engraved with soup names, lending even more flavor to the little shop.

"Granny Tsai's" has cornered the Snake Alley market on elegance with its radiant signage and ample elbow room.

Launching a career

Being highly familiar with the culture of old Wanhua, Ke often pens articles for a Wanhua Community College publication. He has covered topics such as the mercantile history of the area, Japanese geisha culture and the diversity of ethnic groups that came over when the national government relocated to Taiwan. He's also often invited to offer guided tours for students. When the spirit moves him, customers also get the chance to hear him speak of days gone by. His mother, Granny Tsai, through her time spent as a stall vendor, is part of Wanhua's history.

After World War II, a young and beautiful Granny Tsai married into the Ke family. On top of taking care of her elders, raising her children, and managing household chores, she also helped her mother-in-law with a rice milk stand. Though it was no walk in the park, she did develop an arsenal of kitchen skills.

Raising six children and caring for an aging mother-in-law began to strain the family's finances. So in 1965, Granny Tsai bought a two-foot-square iron griddle. She used it to make taro rice cakes, later adding rice noodles and fried eel pastries. In 1976, after Ke Te-lung finished his military service, he suggested that his mother discontinue the breakfast business and get into offering more lucrative lunch, supper and late-night snack items instead.

However, three long years of hectic round-the-clock life became too physically demanding. While the family's financial outlook improved, it did so at the expense of their health. They had no choice but to depart from the prevailing high-volume/narrow-profit-margin route. They then put their younger brother in charge of running a seafood business with their mother. All of the other brothers in the family were earning their living outside the home. It came as a bolt from the blue when their younger brother--the protector and caretaker of their parents--passed away at age 37 from cirrhosis of the liver. Their younger brother is pictured with a stall-cart on a blown-up photo which hangs on the wall of the new shop. It serves as a silent reminder of him to the family.

After taking their overall health and strength into account, their parents changed the business strategy to incorporate simpler items which required minimal processing. The relatively relaxed pace of a sweet soup and dumpling shop fit the bill. So, in 1982 the billing on the shop sign was changed to read "Granny Tsai's." For more than 20 years since, Granny Tsai's sweet soup has received public praise many times over.

Even though Snake Alley's business development plan is still underway, business gradually picked up after their shop was renovated--thanks to the bright streetlights that attract tourists to the area. Granny Tsai has witnessed the continuous reincarnation of Snake Alley for 40 years. Now that her son is at the helm, he hopes that visitors will be able to recapture the brilliance of Snake Alley with each mouthful of that delicious sweet peanut soup.

"Granny Tsai's" red bean, peanut and salty dumpling soups warm the tummies of night market visitors.

Their sorely missed younger brother, who met with an untimely death, is pictured with Granny Tsai's vendor stall.

Snake Alley's Chinese-style archway--in its heyday splendor.