If it's still open, it would be going for 130+ years at this point.
ETA: Found it. Established 1895, the year Taiwan was annexed by Japan. It's not soup, it's a meat sauce (滷肉) used on a noodle dish. Scroll down to the middle of the page, which shows the chef with the pot in front of him.
The ingredients are typically finely minced fatty pork with soy sauce and strong flavorings like dried mushroom, garlic, star anise, and a fermented bean sauce that's super salty. Plus other ingredients that make the taste unique to the chef or shop.
Sure, the soup is good ... but is it the best they could have after 52 years? By committing to maintaining one pot for so long, they pay the opportunity cost of not being able to explore related long-lived methods. If there's a different recipe that surpasses this one after only one year of simmering, they'll never find it.
At first I thought this might be related to the secretary problem, but of course if after 50 years of recipe B, you have the option of switching back to recipe A if it's better.
Could perpetual stews over decades act in the same manner?
Poor families do it to cheaply make long lasting meals.
My late maternal grandmother used to have a pot of forever soup on the stove, and she would put whatever she had on hand in.
Spare ribs, check. Leftover veg, check. McDonalds fries, gross, but check.
Of course, my grandmother was a farmer all her life before I was born, so she was always making far too much food (nobody ever left hungry was a mark of pride) but it took some growing up before I really contemplated the kind of life that joke would have come from.
And yes, always had soup going.
Actual customer reviews are less gushing than the WSJ article....
More often than not I have a great experience in restaurants with 2-3 out of 5 in ratings, and shit experiences with restaurants with 4-5/5 ratings, I've simply stopped reading reviews at all, anything with numbers on the internet is basically fuddled with nowadays.
I do wonder if there’s some pluralistic ignorance going on, where travelers convince themselves it must be amazing because everyone else seems to think so.
It didn't give off the vibe of years of collected flavors; it was a thin broth and it didn't taste like much else other than beef broth from a fancy instant noodle packet and a ton of MSG (and to be clear, I'm normally a proponent of MSG but it genuinely was overdone here).
Maybe it really is just the volume that they're going through that's affecting the taste and composition, because they were doing decent business, but this was the biggest disappointment on my short visit to Bangkok.
I would eat it out of respect for the craft and the values that are being preserved.
[1] https://www.seriouseats.com/the-best-slow-cooked-italian-ame...
[1] https://www.seriouseats.com/the-best-slow-cooked-italian-ame...
> Aren’t Italian Americans just regular Italians
No. The term generally refers to a groups of people descended from Italian immigrants who formed their own culture in America that blended regional Italian languages and cuisines with local American ingredients, language and customs. The big pot of red sauce in question doesn't exist in Italy, it's an invention of early 20th century Italian immigrants to the US.
It is typically the custom of Americans to hyphenate our ethnicity and claim descent from some European country or another. (Or African or Asian, or wherever the family had migrated from.)
Indeed, an Italian-American is not a "regular Italian" because they enjoy neither citizenship nor residence in that sovereign territory. Italian-American cuisine is also unique, and distinct from "regular Italian" cuisine. Sure, they draw a lot of ideas from the Old Country, but c'mon: tomatoes originated in the Americas!
I could be known as an "Irish-American" but really, I was adopted by a non-Irish family, and the Irish clergy/religious who educated me were fully inculturated into the United States, so we learned a patriotism for our homeland, along with a very American faith and culture, and not a futile nostalgia for some long-lost European territory. There was not a trace of Celtic spirituality or "Irish Republican rebellion" taught to me or my classmates.
I do appreciate Irish culture from afar, and I enjoy the St. Patrick's Day festivities that are not drunken orgies, but I am constantly reminded that I was never "Irish" and I do not derive my identity from hyphenating such things.
Oh, you mean the flavoring!