In Taiwan, breakfast can be a rushed affair. On the curb in front of a street-food vendor, you’ll see scooters hastily parked as their riders, helmets still fastened, queue beside smart office workers and uniformed students, waiting for their turn to order. Now and then, a retiree or an idle auntie claims a low plastic stool, savouring their choice with unhurried ease. But for many, breakfast is eaten on the go as they sweep through the city.

The Taiwanese breakfast shop is a product of the region’s postwar history: its origins lie with the steady flow of wheat that came as part of Cold War-era aid programmes from the US and also with the arrival of mainland Chinese refugees who knew precisely what to do with it. Until then, rice, not wheat, was the island’s staple stodge and the latter was a foreign commodity, largely unfamiliar to most. For breakfast, wheat flour was used to make long, deep-fried dough sticks, flaky flatbreads or pillowy buns. Sometimes the flatbreads were rolled up with spring onions and an egg to form a dan bing, a morning staple. The first breakfast shops in Taiwan were street stalls, stacked with layers of bamboo steamer baskets and bouquets of fried dough sticks. Eventually, bricks-and-mortar locations began to crop up, though many maintain a certain simplicity: they tend to be humble, utilitarian spaces where food is prepared on a single stainless-steel flat-top griddle facing the street.

“Dan bing is usually pan-fried but we deep-fry ours,” Cheng Hsu-Chong, the second-generation owner of the Chongqing Soy Milk and Fried Egg breakfast shop, tells Monocle. The 50 year-old institution on the edge of a traditional market has neither a front wall nor a door. Why deep fry? “It’s faster,” he says. “And it tastes better.”

The main action takes place at a vendor cart in front of the shop, where Cheng’s son is poised over a fryer. He drops a thin flatbread speckled with spring onions into the bubbling oil, then cracks an egg into the fryer. As the bread crisps and expands, he folds it around the egg, lifting it from the oil, before adding a diced pickled daikon radish. With a swift motion, he hands it over to the cashier, who finishes it with a few generous shakes of ground white pepper. The dan bing is paired with a hot cup of sweetened, freshly brewed soy milk, a popular drink at Taiwanese breakfast shops.

The precise origins of the dan bing, which is more like a light puff pastry than fried dough, remains as murky as the bubbling oil from which ours has just emerged. In Mandarin, dan means “egg” and bing means “flatbread”. It is thought to have originated in Taiwan as an extra-thin riff on the spring-onion pancake. Variations exist, some more crêpe-like than others.

“Many people use the batter method but we just roll it out from dough,” says Qin Hui Lin, the owner of Miss Qin’s Soy Milk Shop. “It’s what I grew up with.” Qin’s parents came to Taiwan by way of the eastern Chinese province of Jiangsu during China’s civil war and she grew up eating dan bing stuffed with chopped-up fermented long beans, served with finely minced chilli and a thickened soy sauce flavoured with bean curd. It’s one of the specialities at her family’s shop, which began as a modest stall under an awning 76 years ago and has since expanded into two adjacent shopfronts. One of them, positioned on a street corner, has a deli-style counter, while the other is for those who want to eat in. A solid wall divides the two areas.

Qin’s son, who is now in charge, refreshed the shop recently with a new coat of paint and professionally taken photos of the dishes, displayed both on the menus and in the décor. The food bears plenty of influences from the family’s Jiangsu heritage. Among the highlights are the lion’s head meatballs, a dish that consists of pork with soy sauce and spices. “The meatballs were originally just for the staff but our customers liked them too and now they’re one of our signatures,” says Qin. Traditionally served in a broth with cabbage leaves, they’re now sold by Qin in a sesame-dotted flatbread that resembles a meatball sub. “You have to keep adapting,” she says.

Despite such willingness to adapt, most breakfast shops have remained little changed for decades. That said, a new wave of younger entrepreneurs is taking a different approach. You’ll find Lao Jiang’s House, which is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, not in an old market but on the edges of Taipei’s financial district. The owners are five friends who quit their day jobs to start the business after the coronavirus-related lockdowns.

“Most of us have worked at traditional breakfast shops at some point,” says co-owner Din Tsung-Hsiung. “We just wanted to create something a little different.” Servicing mostly white-collar workers during rush hour and late-night club-goers on the weekends, Lao Jiang’s House has a menu that offers all of the classics but with subtle updates. For example, there’s a dan bing stuffed with spring-onion-scented beef instead of just egg and another with a rice-paper exterior. “It’s stuff that we want to eat ourselves,” says Din.

What makes Lao Jiang’s House stand out is its décor. With white tiles, light-wood trimmings and solid timber tables, it looks more like a Western coffee shop than a traditional breakfast shop. The space has been carefully designed to encourage diners to linger. Across Taiwan, the idea of a more design-forward breakfast space – albeit with the same level of comfort as the original breakfast shops – is gaining traction. Few do it as effortlessly as Nite-Nite Breakfast, a newcomer that has quietly entered the scene. Tucked away in the Neihu district, it has floor-to-ceiling glass windows and is branded with a smiley-face logo with bright-yellow accents. The dining area is spacious and flooded with natural light, a deliberate counterpoint to Nite-Nite’s often cramped competitors.

“Most breakfast shops are on busy street corners. We chose this spot to help people to unwind,” says Jane Hu, a marketing manager – a position that few old-school breakfast shops employ. When Monocle visits on a Monday afternoon, the shop is full of diners sitting down for their meal. The menu is full of unexpected flavour combinations. There’s a mapo tofu dan bing, stuffed with tofu, minced meat and fermented chilli sauce; we’re also tempted by an egg sandwich featuring pork floss – dehydrated pork with a candy-floss-like texture – and century egg, a preserved duck egg with a distinctive blackish hue.

Traditionalists might scoff at new establishments of this kind (as well as at the tendency of their clientele to take photos of their food) but they are attracting footfall. Perhaps this evolution of the breakfast shop is a quiet rebellion against the sameness of so much brunch culture, with its bland avocado toasts, or the relentless pace of Taipei’s commuter hours? That’s something to discuss over a dan bing, anyway.