After moving back to Philadelphia as an adult with expendable income, I made a couple of declarations about how if anyone ever decided to open a place that did Chinese breakfast how I liked it, I would keep it afloat myself. This was silly for multiple reasons. To begin with, starting in high school, I made a habit of exchanging breakfast for 20 minutes of extra sleep, and have mostly kept it ever since. Even more embarrassingly, there already existed a place in Philly that offered all the accoutrements of my ideal breakfast, one that I had even been inside—only I'd made the mistake of thinking that it was purely a bakery joint and limited myself to snacks: sesame balls, the like.
The place is called Heung Fa Chun Sweet House, between Arch and Cherry on 10th St., but this isn't a restaurant review. Like you need me to tell you that it's good, or cheap, or that the interior layout is some humble affair, when the point at hand here is that I spent a full year hankering on about "really craving some 油條 right now, man I could really go for some 油條 right now," not knowing that I could get some 油條 posthaste with only two ounces of further research—or, say, looked at the menu on the wall when I entered. But if you were, hypothetically, going to find yourself at Heung Fa Chun Sweet House, or any other place that has my three necessary breakfast pillars, here is what to order.
One: 豆漿, or dòujiāng, or doujiang, depending on how you write it, which is fresh soy milk that tastes far more fragrant and less milk-like than the typical soy milk you'd find in an American grocery store. When I'm at home, my mother makes it with this massive purple machine that I can't find on the internet—a recent development, not something I grew up drinking, in part as an endeavor to get me to consume something more substantial in the mornings. The little gritty soybean remains sometimes get thrown into a batch of mantou, while the doujiang itself—hot, lightly sweetened—is my ideal milk substance when making milk tea. A medium at Heung Fa Chun comes, or came anyway, in the same container restaurants give you for noodle broth. I have no idea if there was a misunderstanding or what a large would look like if there wasn't.
Two: 油条, or yóutiáo, or youtiao, literally translating to "oil strip" and translated on Heung Fa Chun's menu as "fried dough." Which is essentially what it is: a deep-fried and eminently dippable strip of dough, and, would you look at that, you have some doujiang to dip it in, if you're into that sort of thing. Sometimes it comes in conjoined pairs, so you have to tear the two halves apart. My parents tried to make this a couple of times when we were younger, but were hampered by our lack of a deep fryer or any sort of thermometer. Still, we enjoyed it then, even though it ran more crispy than chewy. I mean, it's a deep-fried strip of dough with some interactive component. It's good.
Three: 豆腐脑, or dòufunǎo, or doufunao, or literally "tofu brains," though apparently that's a regional term and it's more broadly known as dòuhuā or dòufuhuā elsewhere. This was my greatest barrier to finding a Chinese breakfast place: You can find youtiao places, and occasionally doujiang places, but doufunao has been, in my experience, scarcer. Much like rice or zongzi, talk enough about how you eat doufunao and people can get some geographical sense of where you're from. My mom takes it savory; my dad has it sweet. I like it savory, with the caveat that I've never tried it sweet. It is very, very soft tofu—I've heard that it doesn't count as real tofu, but is instead an earlier stage of tofu, but don't quote me on that—topped with some combination of soy sauce and scallions and zha cai and mushrooms and mini-dried shrimp and chili oil. I drag my spoon through it very carefully so it stays in smaller chunks rather than disintegrating, and eat it like a soup.
There's a $15 minimum to avoid the $1 credit card fee at Heung Fa Chun, and these three items will not reach it. Go get yourself some breakfast, and tack on a little treat for later.
