Restaurant Review: Taiwanese Comfort Food at Drunken Kitchen 

• Alex Springer
• Pan-fried pork buns

Fairly early on in my journalism career, I met Square Kitchen founders Ana Valdemoros and Tham Soekotjo when they were on the verge of cutting the ribbon on their booming culinary incubator. After nearly a decade of them nurturing local culinary talent, I've found myself wandering back to one of their innovative establishments. In addition to their culinary incubator on 751 W. 800 South, they've opened a mini food hall called Square Kitchen Eatery in South Salt Lake (2435 S. State Street).

I have to credit the team at Drunken Kitchen for initially getting me in the door. I've been following this local purveyor of traditional Taiwanese and Chinese eats ever since they started doing takeout orders. I was never quite able to line my schedule up with their weekend hours, but I seized the day and paid them a visit not long after I saw that they were operating out of a storefront.

Said storefront also contains Valdemoros' Argentinian cuisine spot Best Empanadas (@argentinasbestempanadas), Soekotjo's chicken katsu-centric Comfort Bowl (@comfortbowlutah) and boba milk tea brewers Shiba Boba (@shibaboba_slc). It's a great combo of talents on display; both Argentina's Best and Comfort Bowl have been local standouts in the mobile world of food trucks and pop-ups, and Shiba Boba is definitely upper-tier when it comes to their selection of milk tea.

My focus for the trip, however, was Drunken Kitchen. I have been enjoying their vibrant Instagram presence for some time now, and had been unsuccessfully trying to take advantage of their takeout menu for months. Though it took me a long time to finally set foot in Drunken Kitchen's domain, it also gave me plenty of time to think about what I would order when that day came.

I started off with an order of the pan-fried pork buns ($11.99), because damn, do they look succulent on social media. Fortune was smiling upon me as I learned that my order was only minutes out of the pan, so this trio of perfectly steamed buns topped with sesame seeds and scallions was piping hot. They're big boys for sure, stuffed with a generous amount of ground pork and served with a cup of DK's own crimson chili sambal; think the spicy chili flake sauce that has been having a moment recently.

The pork buns are all about textural contrasts. The steaming process makes the dough light and fluffy, and the pan fry gives them a nice, crispy sheen on their little tuchuses. Filling-wise, I liked how the pork was cooked, but I found the textures to be more interesting than the flavors. There wasn't anything wrong with them, and a liberal dose of the sambal adds a nice numbing heat, but I was missing a flavor contrast to match the nice balance of textures.

This lament was even more pronounced in contrast to the Taiwanese beef noodle soup ($21.99), with its rich broth, homemade noodles, tender chunks of beef shank and plenty of pickled mustard greens. Looking at the spectrum of beef noodle soups along the Wasatch Front, I'd say your top-tier local stuff comes from spots like One More Noodle House and Mom's Kitchen, which is just up the street from DK. I'd also say that the Taiwanese beef noodle soup at Drunken Kitchen is right there among the best.

I love a soup that conceals its ingredients in a dark, steamy broth, because each dip of the chopsticks is going to bring something new to the lips. There are so many lovely things swimming around in this rich broth, made slightly acidic by the thick slices of tomatoes along for the ride. The beef shank is gorgeously tender, the bok choy is toothsome but not unpleasantly crunchy and the noodles have the perfect amount of chewy heft to them (forgive my brain hijacking this to European territory, but I couldn't stop thinking of spaetzle with each bite).

Everything going on in this soup is marvelous—I have already etched Drunken Kitchen on my list of preferred soup haunts for when winter freezes us over—but I need to make a special shoutout to the pickled mustard greens. They've been pulled from the jar at that ideal moment where they still maintain their crunch, and their time marinating in pickling brine has imparted an excellent acidic flavor. This feels like an opportune time to mention that these, along with pickled serranos and preserved duck eggs, are extras that you can snag from DK. Whatever they're doing on the pickling front is paying off in tasty dividends.

While Square Kitchen Eatery has a great lineup of local culinary pros, I have to hand it to Drunken Kitchen. This stuff is the kind of flavor wake-up call that will be a special balm to those in the throes of hangovers and heartbreak.