Ching Cheng Hainanese Chicken Rice is probably the most popular chicken rice shop in Taipei. Their chicken is famously tenderly juicy sweet and it is eaten with their signature hand made daily fresh spring onion and ginger sauce.
Restaurant name: 慶城海南雞飯
Address: 台北市松山區慶城街16巷8號 No. 8, Lane 16, Qingcheng Street, Songshan District, Taipei City, Taiwan 105
GPS: 25°03'10.6"N 121°32'44.1"E 🌐 25.052939, 121.545580
Nearest MRT: Nanjing Fuxing Station
Tel: +886 (02)-8712-1200
Hours: Lunch 11:00am - 3:00pm | Dinner 4:00pm - 9:00pm (Sat & Sun off)
Non Halal
Owner 林英芳 founded Ching Cheng Hainanese Chicken Rice 慶城海南雞飯 12 years ago in 2007 after visiting his brother in Bangkok (Thailand). So, 林英芳's Hainanese chicken rice is Thai inspired.
Ching Cheng serves only chicken legs. The fresh chicken legs (never chilled) are cooked in vegetable soup with cabbage, onion and carrot. The legs are poached at 85℃ until the tendons at the knee just snap apart. That meant that the legs are cooked to the right doneness with tenderness and natural juicy sweetness intact.
The cooked legs are then dunked in ice water to halt further cooking and also to tighten the meat thus sealing in the juices and flavour. The chicken is served in meaty boneless chunks with sides like egg roll, greens, cabbage, tofu skin, pickles, flavoured rice and a clear soup.
Queues form every day even before Ching Cheng Hainanese Chicken Rice open for the day. Ching Cheng sells over 1,000 servings of chicken rice a day. Things weren't always so rosy.
Business wasn't good when 林英芳 first started. Taipei customers were not accustomed to his spicy sourish Thai style sauce. A customer suggested to 林英芳 to pair his poached chicken with Cantonese style spring onion and ginger sauce. That one change, changed the fate of Ching Cheng Hainanese Chicken Rice. (It pays to listen to customer feedback 😄 )
林英芳 insists on personally cutting and dicing the spring onion and ginger by hand, taking 3 hours everyday just for this task. That made all the difference to the mouth feel of Ying Cheng's sauce compared to commercial or machine processed sauces. Ting Cheng's sauce has a subtle crunch which bursts natural spring onion and ginger fragrances and flavours whereas machine processed sauces feel mushy and taste a little flat.
Customers like Ching Cheng's spring onion and ginger sauce because it accentuates the sweetness in the tender juicy poached chicken. 林英芳 said some customers also ate their rice using the spring onion and ginger dip almost like a side dish in itself. It's that good.
Customers like Ching Cheng's poached chicken for its juicy tenderness and natural chicken sweetness. They also like it that the chicken meat is smooth and has a slight springy chewiness to the bite.
林英芳 uses fragrant long grain Thai rice which he boils with chicken stock, garlic, pandan leaf and milk. Customers like it that the rice are loose, separate easily, has tender nuttiness and rich savoury sweet flavour.
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