Is Ay-Chung Flour-Rice Noodle A Great Place To Eat?

Ay-Chung Flour Rice-Noodle is a famous noodle stall in the heart of the popular Ximending area in Taipei on Emei Street. Having been around since 1975, Ay-Chung has established itself as a popular destination in Ximending through the years.

It’s a guarantee that there will be a line, I mean there’s painted lines on the ground with arrows directing you where to go if you show up on a especially busy day. Clearly, they know how to, and are used to dealing with large crowds.

The Ay-Chung Menu

The menu at Ay-Chung is about as simple as it gets. There’s only one food option, with two different sizes. You can get the flour rice noodles in two different sizes: a large (80 NTD, $2.46 USD) or a small (65 NTD, $2.00 USD) and that’s it. There’s also the option to buy frozen food or a jar of the chili sauce, but in terms of food options they only serve their famous flour rice noodles.

They obviously know what their bread and butter is here and 100% focus on it. Based off how crowded it generally is, their focus on just the flour rice noodles has paid off!

Ay-Chung Flour-Rice Noodle

I ended up getting a small cup of the Ay-Chung flour rice noodle. With the quick assembly line like service they have, my order came up quite quickly, another benefit of serving one item.

There’s some single chairs around that you can sit in, if you can find one available, to eat your noodles. Otherwise you can stand around and eat, which is what the majority of people are doing.

They have a nice little self service condiment station that included vinegar, garlic, and chili sauce. You can help yourself to it and mix and match to your heart’s content until you find that right flavor mix.

Before I added anything, I wanted to give the base soup a taste.

I don’t know that I would call this a soup. The consistency wasn’t very soup like at all. It was quite thick. More like gravy in its consistency…which was interesting. Definitely quite salty with a smoky, fishy taste to it. It was alright on its own. Certainly a unique taste and consistency combination.

After giving it a taste, I added a little bit of vinegar, garlic, and chilii sauce to get the flavor to something more my liking.

The noodles were very thin, silky smooth, and very soft. They were pretty good and certainly soaked up the soupy gravy.

There were pieces of pig intestine mixed in with the noodles as well. Some pieces were tender and others pretty chewy. I’m not a big boiled intestine fan so this was a mixed bag for me.

The cilantro topping provided a nice complementary flavor to the soupy gravy and noodles which was nice.

Is Ay-Chung Flour-Rice Noodle Worth A Visit?

If you’re in Ximending, sure, it’s worth a visit. It’s a very famous stall that’s been around for nearly 50 years serving one dish. Certainly they must be doing something right. The throngs of people that frequent it and give it a try is really, truly impressive.

With that being said, in my own personal opinion, it was just alright. The soupy gravy consistency wasn’t something I could totally get behind and it was really salty. I liked that they had vinegar, garlic, and chili sauce that you could at your leisure. That certainly helped me create a soupy gravy that was more to my liking.

I’m also really not into intestines so having bits of it with the noodles wasn’t my favorite thing in the world lol.

But the noodles were pretty solid and let’s be honest a small cup of this was only $2.00 USD so why not give it a try and see what you think about it?