By Jullie Y. Daza As the Chinese saying goes, long noodles, long life. At Miensan Noodle House, noodles are the signature and the reason for being. For more than 20 years, a faithful community of Mien San fans, including Chef Gene Gonzales, agrees with owner Alice, an import from Taiwan, that no Asian can ever have too much noodles-Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Filipinos, they love them morning, noon, night, and midnight, too.  At Mien San, a no-frills but cheerful place on Granada street’s Villa Ortigas 2 in Barangay Valencia, New Manila, and its first branch on Connecticut St. near the Greenhills shopping center, diners feast on their noodles with or without soup, cold or hot, noodles with beef, chicken, or fish; noodles for starters and noodles for the main course; noodles spicy or friendly for kids. Alice’s husband is the chef–if you get a chance to talk to him, he will urge you to “try something different today” and then disappear into the kitchen to whip up a surprise just for you. “Call me Alice in Wonderland,” says Alice. Once you’ve tried a minimum of two to three different  dishes with or without noodles, you’ll agree that it’s the diner who’ll find himself or herself in a wonderland of Taiwanese street food, including rice toppings, buns with a variety of sweet or meaty fillings, combo meals smartly presented on a tray, and little plates of tongue teasers to whet the appetite and get the meal going. A great favorite of Alice’s faithful customers is fried (or steamed) shrimp dumpling with radish and cilantro. Oh, yes, do not forget the tea, as plain and simple as it may appear when it is being poured into your cup, but taste it and see how it refreshes and delights with every sip and swallow! As foodies discover that there’s more to Chinese food than Cantonese dishes as exemplified by Hong Kong and many a Chinese restaurant in Metro Manila, they’re learning that Taiwan is attracting tourists for the variety of its regional cuisines, street food being only a slice of its growing popularity. In the last several years, the number of Taiwanese establishments in Metro Manila has grown, one could say almost invisibly, as the tendency of people hunting for good food at affordable prices is to lump Chinese (as in Cantonese) and Taiwanese together. Speaking from my own experience after a number of exploratory trips to Taipei and other cities, I can vouch for the versatility of Taiwan’s  famous and anonymous chefs–I think they invented xiao long pao–and the great abundance of the freshest, sweetest vegetables ever to travel from farm to food festival, from a private kitchen to a hotel’s salad bar. It’s not happenstance–Taiwan happens to feed its people with the fruits of their fields and farms: Agriculture’s importance was never sacrificed for the glamorization of industry, not even those high-tech enterprises with millennial appeal. In Taipei as in other cities, Millennials love their street food, too. Let’s drink to that with a cuppa tea!