Hidden in Taipei’s Xinyi Market — Trade your way to a fragrant and nutritious Huzhou-style zongzi lunch!

I once interviewed the knife-cut noodle stall on the first floor of Taipei’s “Xinyi Market,” but had no idea there was also a champion zongzi shop hidden on the second floor — “Sixi Food Store.” On the day of the interview, I wandered around the first floor for a while before finding the stairs to go up. When I reached the second floor, I felt as if I had stepped into the scene of an old apartment from a Hong Kong movie — worn and slightly eerie. That’s when I started dreading my phone ringing loudly and giving me a fright. Of course, Murphy’s Law struck, and my phone rang. Thankfully, it wasn’t a ghost call, but my photography colleague: “Where are you? I can’t find the shop!” This zongzi shop is really well hidden.

“When our zongzi are freshly steamed and you open them up, they smell amazing. My classmates would always ask what I’d brought, and my brother even traded his zongzi with classmates for money so he could buy his own nutrition lunch — because they wanted to eat them that badly,” laughed Zhang Haojie, the third-generation owner of “Sixi Food Store.” His younger brother, Zhang Haoxiang, chimed in: “Back then, nutrition lunches were really cheap, so we had leftover money to buy a cold drink.”

But the brothers never imagined that they would one day come back to take over the family zongzi business passed down from their grandfather. “Later on, my dad’s health took a turn for the worse, and with just my mom trying to manage everything on her own, it became too much work. So I came back to help right after graduation,” said Zhang Haojie.Read the full story