Export culture with delicious food, orange shop "Yunhai Yanxuan" celebrates its anniversary
Located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (Brooklyn), "Yunhai Yanxuan", the first Taiwanese citrus store in New York, celebrated its first anniversary a few days ago. The day coincided with the Dragon Boat Festival, and the owner also invited hundreds of friends, Business partners gathered together; intending to export Taiwanese culture through food, the Taiwanese hawker "Tri Club" also brought Taiwanese food-based food to share with the participants, which was well received.
The founder of Yunhai Yanxuan, Lisa Cheng Smith, and partner Lillian Lin chose to open a Taiwanese food orange shop in Brooklyn, hoping to increase public awareness of Taiwan through food. In 2018, they started from e-commerce, until 2022 to open a physical store in New York City. Their behavior of exporting culture through food has been appreciated by President Tsai Ing-wen. When they stopped in New York during their visit to Central America in March this year, they visited the store especially.
Looking back on all the experiences in the past year, Lin Siyu said that at the beginning, she just opened the store with an adventurous mentality. "We knew that people would like it, but we were not sure if it would be done well. I didn't expect it to be much better than expected." And Thanks to my friends who have supported me along the way.
She believes that the current community regards it as a "specialty store", but they hope to operate more like a grocery store and become a place where everyone visits and shops every day; she also pointed out that there is a concentrated Chinese community in Williamsburg. Mainly the elderly, and hope to increase exposure through community cooperation in the future to attract this group.
To promote Taiwanese cuisine, they also invited the Taiwanese hawker "Tri Club" as the catering contractor for the night's food. The two tea egg salads and sand tea pig salad sandwiches they brought were very popular; according to Guo Minzhen, Wang Youhe, and He Rouying According to a member, they use food elements familiar to Americans with Taiwanese tastes to make food that can not only retain the taste of their hometown but also be acceptable to Westerners.
"Tri Club" was also established a year ago, and was invited to participate in the pop-up food event held by "Yunhai Yanxuan" in the early days. "Now that we are celebrating the first anniversary of its establishment, we are invited back again, like a cycle." I feel very honored.