Once a year, the West Coast’s biggest Taiwanese American cultural celebration takes over Union Square for a day of lion dance performances, acrobatics, live music, local art and, of course, a whole lot of delicious food. We’re talking beef noodle soup with hand-pulled noodles. Silky, sweet tofu pudding. Night market–style candied fruit skewers.
With all the discourse around downtown San Francisco’s restaurant and retail apocalypse, maybe this is precisely what Union Square needs to bring some life to the neighborhood.
At least, that’s what Alan Ma, a co-director of this year’s Taiwanese American Cultural Festival, is hoping. Organized by the Bay Area chapter of the nonprofit Taiwanese American Professionals (TAP), the festival kicks off its 31st annual edition — minus a couple years’ hiatus during the height of the pandemic — on Saturday, May 11.
Unlike some previous incarnations of the festival, this year’s version won’t have a specific theme. Instead, Ma explains, the focus will just be on “revitalizing traffic or noise in San Francisco, given a lot of news of people leaving.”
“I just want to bring back what is still here, what is still alive in San Francisco,” he says.
Part of how Ma and his fellow organizers hope to generate that sense of excitement is by offering the widest variety of Taiwanese foods and beverages in the festival’s history. In recent years, the only hot food options came from the tent operated by Liang’s Village, a longtime South Bay mainstay. But as tasty as Liang’s is — and the restaurant will once again be on hand this year to sling hand-pulled beef noodle soup, lu rou fan and other classic Taiwanese dishes — there’s no way for a single vendor to capture all of the depth, breadth and overall vibrancy of the cuisine.