This Sleek Taiwanese Street Food Lounge Serves Beef Noodle Soup Until 2:30 a.m.

The Midnight Diners is a regular collaboration between KQED food editor Luke Tsai and artist Thien Pham. Follow them each week as they explore the hot pot restaurants, taco carts and 24-hour casino buffets that make up the Bay Area’s after-hours dining scene.

Much has been written about the demise of the American Chinatown, as well as the specific troubles that have plagued Oakland Chinatown in recent years — a double whammy of pandemic-related doldrums and fears about anti-Asian violence. These days, the neighborhood feels like a ghost town anytime after 6 o’clock at night, to say nothing of the late-night jook and roast duck feasts I remember enjoying even just five or six years ago.

You’d never guess at any of this, though, if your only data point was Lounge Chinatown, a stylish Taiwanese bar and restaurant that opened in December of 2022 with the explicit intention of being a late-night destination: It serves its massive menu of Taiwanese and Chinese street food specialties until 2:30 a.m., seven days a week.

Run by the folks behind Dragon Gate (another classic Oakland night spot), Lounge stands out like a gaudily neon-lit, bamboo-bedecked beacon amid the well-weathered storefronts and boarded-up windows of 8th Street, in the heart of Chinatown. At a little past 9 o’clock on a recent Thursday night, it was one of just a small handful of places in the entire neighborhood that was still open.

The first thing you notice about Lounge Chinatown is the decor, which is so hiply and aggressively Asia-fied in its aesthetics that 20-year-old me, at the very height of my AZN pride, would have eaten it up — all sleek red leather booths, lucky cat figurines and sexily back-lit Taiwanese whiskey bottles. Five or six different kinds of light fixtures, all designed to resemble various paper lanterns, bask the dining room in a nightclub-like glow. Meanwhile, a mural running the length of the restaurant depicts an unidentified Asian night market scene in such a way that the night market looks like the coolest damn place in the world.

This is the kind of restaurant where you might imagine Jet Li — or Son Goku, at the height of his powers — strolling in for a late-night bowl of noodles. And, honest to God, even middle-aged me found the whole vibe to be pretty badass.

The main reason we’d come, however, is because I can never resist the siren call of stinky tofu — or of Taiwanese street food, more broadly. Even more so when it’s still available hours after midnight. As it turns out, the menu covers a surprisingly (and intimidatingly) vast range of Chinese and Taiwanese food genres, running the gamut from meat skewers to hot pot and malatang. You’ll do very well for yourself if you stick to the most famous Taiwanese classics.

If you aren’t unnecessarily squeamish, you’ll start, as we did, with an order of the fried stinky tofu, which arrives at the table crisp-edged and deliciously pungent, served with all the standard accompaniments: pickled cabbage, soy paste dressing and a dollop of chili sauce. It’s about as tasty a version as you can find in the East Bay.