Meinong Hakka Flat Rice Noodles 美浓粄条
Meinong Hakka Flat Rice Noodles is featured among the local specialties of Taiwan.
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Meinong Hakka Flat Rice Noodles (美浓粄条) are rice noodles cut from steamed rice sheets, a Hakka food of Meinong (美濃) in Kaohsiung (高雄). In the Hakka villages of southern Taiwan they are called mian pa ban (面帕粄), because the steamed sheet looks like a face towel, mianpa (面帕) in Hakka. HakkaNews counts more than a hundred noodle shops in Meinong.
How it is made
Chinese Wikipedia describes the basic method: indica rice (在來米) is ground into a rice milk, poured into a flat tray and steamed in a steamer. Chiu Hsing-wei (邱星崴), deputy minister of the Hakka Affairs Council, says the southern version also takes sweet potato starch, which makes the noodles springier, and is finished with fried shallots.
HakkaNews found only three Meinong shops still making noodles by hand, and only one, Jiaxiangwei (家鄉味), doing every step by hand: soaking and grinding the rice, hanging the sheets to dry, then tearing and cutting them, which takes more than two hours. It uses indica rice with a hard core and a strong rice aroma, and its noodles come out coarse and curled.
How it is eaten
Meinong eats the noodles in soup, dry-tossed or stir-fried, and locals divide into black-vinegar, chilli and both-sauces camps. At Acheng (阿城), the soup is a bone broth simmered for three hours with shallots fried each day and a clear note of pepper; the noodles are thin, uneven and slightly translucent. At Meiguang (美光), founded in 1945, the stir-fried noodles come with shredded pork, carrot, garlic chives, bean sprouts and onion, seasoned with soy sauce and white pepper; the owner suggests adding black vinegar, chilli or bean paste (豆瓣醬). Jiaxiangwei's rough hand-cut noodles hold sauce well, so its dry version is the most popular.
Where it comes from
Chiu describes ban tiao as a snack Hakka people once relied on to keep up their strength during the busy farming seasons. The Kaohsiung city government's Hakka Affairs Commission held a ban tiao festival in Meinong in October 2025, with free tastings of six creative versions, among them noodles with Italian meat sauce and Thai-style noodles.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and fact-checked against them on 2026-09-25. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.