The pork rib noodle shop thats nearly half a century old

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When I told my friend that I needed to go to Fengyuan, a district outside of Taichung city, he said you have to go and have the famous spare ribs noodles. He didn't mention which particular shop. So when I arrived at Fengyuan the next day, I google for spare ribs noodle and there was one called Qīngshuǐ about 500 meters away. Anyway, it was en route to where I needed to go and it was around lunch time, so it was a no brainer. I followed google map and turned down a little lane that had many food stalls on either side.

It wasn't difficult to find Qīngshuǐ down the little lane as it was the busiest amongst all the shops and there was a short queue outside. The inside wasn't big, seating no more than 20 people, and it was full.

I joined the queue and studied the cooking area to see what this place is all about. There were many small pots of cooked ribs outside. They were all cold. That's rather odd I thought.

On one side of the working area was a stack of what looked like dirty bowls with leftovers inside. Then I realised these are the bowls used to serve the food! The 'leftovers' are actually the essence of the soup. It's fried garlic and spring onion. They scope a spoonful to the base of the bowl before the broth is poured on top. Later on I realised why they did this.

On the other side of the kitchen, if you can call that, is a lady cooking the noodles. The pots of spare ribs are steamed here. That's why they had so many of the cold ones around, they were to be steamed. There are two types of noodles on the shelf in front of the lady. The white one is thin rice noodles and the yellow on the right is thick noodles.

While I was still busy absorbing everything that was going on, I was quickly beckoned to a vacant seat. As I walked inside, the lady asked me what noodle I wanted. I was a bit taken back by the sudden question as I hadn't even given that any thought about eating yet. I quickly blurted out egg noodle. Not sure why.

So I sat down at my table and looked around the restaurant. Apparently Qīngshuǐ has been around for nearly 5 decades, but the interior doesn't look that old. My guess is that they started off as a mobile stall and then moved to fixed premises. That's quite common for established eateries here in Taiwan. It's quite small inside, basically once you sat down, it's better if you don't move around as the the staff walk in and out with the bowls of noodles all the time. You can tell the size of the eating area from my distance to the three walls in my photos. Pretty small.

Given their efficiency, it was only a matter of minutes before my bowl of noodles came. For NTD90 which is less thant USD3, you really get your money's worth. There was a large portionof egg noodles, and the spare ribs were tipped on top on the other side of the bowl. It smelled really nice but I couldn't put my finger on what the ingredient was.

Normally, I'm not a big fan of spare ribs as I like my pork sliced. OK, odd I know, but that's just me. Anyway, these pork ribs were really good. They've been deep fried first, and than steamed till tender but not falling apart, so there's still a nice bite to it. The deep fried followed by steam cooking method left a nice coating of the marinade on the suface of the rib. When soaked in the broth it add another level of flavour to it.

I rarely order thick noodles as I find them a bit stodgy, but this time my snap decision was a good call. As I ate my noodles, stirring them in the broth, I discovered the fried garlic and spring onions from earlier on. They had gradually disintegrated into the hot broth, and combined with the juice from the spare ribs gave out this lovely aroma. That was why I couldn't work why the bowl of noodle smell so good when they put it in front of me.

I don't know if Qīngshuǐ is THE spare rib noodle shop or one of the many in Fengyuan, and that they're all so good. I decided to satisfy my curiosity and googled for Fengyuan spare ribs. Qīngshuǐ came up first on the list with 1730 reviews and the next one trailed with 472. Seems like I got lucky and found the most popular one.