Hulk Fried Rice Taipei (1)

The only problem with the AU$1,500 Sydney-to-Amsterdam return airfare with an 18-hour layover in Taipei is that we hit Taipei at 6am, and they’re rather funny with their hotel check-in times in Taipei. It’s got to be 3pm. Even Airbnb hosts stick to this like glue I found when looking for a place to recover from the brutalities of modern air travel. Something to do with Chiang Kai-shek? Most things do in Taiwan.

To kill time, I catch the metro into Taipei proper along with Taipei’s sleep-deprived commuters. One very fashionable-looking young guy tries to catch up on sleep standing up. Holding onto a strap. Then you see him nodding … nodding … nodding … OFF! Hand lets go of strap. He will fall. But no! Catches the strap with his other hand. Rinse and repeat. Unfailing. Genius! Couldn’t stop watching him. By my estimate he clocked up an aggregate of 87 seconds of real sleep during the 45-minute ride into Taipei Main Station.

The temperature just after 7.30am is 34 degrees Celsius. The streets around Taipei main station are a fast-flowing stampede of scooters, a Pamplona of steel and rubber.

I’d like to make out I found Hulk Fried Rice through my unerring instinct for interesting eateries, but really, Hulk Fried Rice was on a street corner where you couldn’t miss it if you were walking in that part of New Taipei. A slap-dash streetcorner eatery with a façade painted Hulk-green, with a commercial stove and with a few tables and stools on the footpath. An older-brother-younger-brother-mum operation.

After several hours of purposelessly tramping around Taipei, I was badly in need of sitting down. A bowl of fried rice was just the ticket in those circumstances, I decided.

So, I went up to the counter of Hulk Fried Rice, stuck up one index finger, smiled and said: “Fried rice, please”.

“No, no”, smiled older brother apologetically.

“No fried rice?”, I asked.

“No, only fry noodle.”

“Noodle? But it says …” I pointed up.

“Noodle”, insisted the older brother apologetically and with a shy smile.

“OK”, I said, “one fried noodle, please.”

Why would Hulk Fried Rice have moved away from rice to noodles, I wondered?

Younger brother fried noodles, while mum regularly opened a wooden vat balanced in a wok in some water. A gas flame burned fiercely under the wok. The vat contained a black, sticky goo, which was much in demand by the local customers of Hulk Fried Rice.

The frying of my noodles was taking some time, and I had already assumed someone else’s order placed on the counter was mine and had ladled chilli sauce with real chillies in it on to this order, but the rightful owner of the order waved away my apologies, giggling while she did so. Lucky she liked chilli sauce, too.

Each time mum ladled the black goo from the vat into a bowl, she smiled at me with a little bow of the head.

Then it struck me that all the local customers were getting chopsticks out of a box on the counter. I don’t see it as a failing or as an achievement, but I can’t eat with chopsticks.

“Do you have a fork”, I therefore asked older brother.

He smiled and looked nonplussed.

“A   f…o…r…k  ?”, I tried, really slowly, but that didn’t work.

He now pulled his mobile phone out, found the right app and held his phone in front of my face.

“You say”, he said.

“Fork”, I said.

He looked at his screen. A furrow formed in his brow. He held out the phone to me again.

“Fork”, I said.

He checked, then shook his head.

I sketched a fork in the air and gestured as if I were using the air fork to eat. He looked on in honest bewilderment.

In the end the problem was solved by asking other patrons if they knew what a fork was in Chinese to please tell older brother. When one did, with a mouthful of noodle, it was if heavy clouds suddenly vanished from older brother’s brow.

“Yes, they has”, the English-speaking patron, told me. “No worry.”

I saw younger brother taking a break from frying noodle, mum making re-assuring gestures.

The intersection outside Hulk Fried Rice then staged an altercation between scooterists after a bang and a screech. So, there were scooter accidents, I thought while I watched with interest.

Older brother now caught my eye. He was ladling noodles in a bowl, while politely head-bowing. He put my order on the counter.

“Please”, he said.

There was as yet no fork, so I played for time, ladling chilli sauce on my noodles. I was about to mention the small matter of the fork, without which I would be helpless, when younger brother returned, panting, from an errand on which I had not seen him leave.

He was brandishing a white plastic, disposable cake fork