What it is
Ham and egg toast (火腿蛋吐司) is a simple sandwich of sliced white bread, a slice of pan-fried ham and a fried egg. It is one of the quickest orders at Taiwan's Western-style breakfast shops (西式早餐店), which sell sandwiches and burgers rather than soy milk and flatbreads.
Where it came from
Mei Er Mei (美而美), opened by Lin Kun-yen (林坤炎) on Bade Road in Taipei in 1981, is usually seen as the starting point of Taiwan's Western-style breakfast chains. He had earlier sold burgers at the city baseball stadium with little success, then did better from a cart near a vocational school. His shop moved sandwiches and burgers, until then lunch or dinner foods, onto the breakfast menu.
The name was not registered early, so countless shops copied it. Court cases began in 1988, and in 1994 the courts judged it a weak trademark. Lin's own group renamed itself Ju Lin Mei Er Mei (巨林美而美), and by 1992 it already had more than 1,100 franchise shops. McDonald's arrived in 1984 and pushed breakfast shops towards faster service and fast-food style menus.
In Tainan, Li Sung-tien (李松田) and Chen Yi-chun (陳怡君) opened a Mei Er Mei Hamburger Shop in 1983. It launched the Good Morning Mei Chih Cheng (早安美芝城) brand in 1995 and had about 1,400 branches by 2017.
How it is made
The bread is toasted lightly, and some shops cut off the crusts. Ham is fried on the griddle until it browns at the edges, and an egg is fried alongside. Many breakfast shops spread the bread with a translucent, jelly-like cooked dressing thickened with starch. At Lao Chiang in Kaohsiung the egg is left half cooked and the toast is spread with house-made margarine.
How to eat it
It is a breakfast food, often taken away. Black tea or black tea with milk is a common drink alongside. Round-the-clock shops also serve it as a late-night snack.
Around Taiwan
- Tainan
- Good Morning Mei Chih Cheng (早安美芝城), with about 1,400 branches across Taiwan, began in Tainan in 1983 as a Mei Er Mei hamburger shop.
- Kaohsiung
- At Lao Chiang Black Tea Milk (老江紅茶牛奶), open round the clock since 1953, a soft-egg ham toast is the top order both at breakfast and late at night, usually with the shop's black tea with milk.
