冠軍牛肉麵坊 Champion Beef Noodle @ Taipei

One of my favourite places in Taipei to spend a day in the National Palace Museum and when I am hungry, there’s a nice beef noodle place in the adjacent building.

There is a full service Chinese restaurant at the National Palace Museum (NPM) in Taipei called Silk Palace 故宮晶華 that offered Shanghainese and Taiwanese cuisine with utensils and tableware closely matching NPM artefacts. Regent Taipei’s beef noodles are a beloved and classic delicacy, renowned for their rich flavours and high quality.

In the basement, they have a simple dining choice serving Taiwanese beef noodles in porcelain faux dings called 台灣冠軍牛肉面 Taiwanese Champion Beef Noodles. The beef noodles became internationally known after winning the top prize at the 8^th Taipei International Beef Noodle Soup Competition in 2012, and being named “Taipei’s Best Beef Noodle” by CNN in 2015. Since then, the hotel’s chefs have been invited to showcase their creations in major cities like Tokyo, Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, and New York.

This is a no-frills dining experience, where you order the noodles (only six choices are available) by ticking the box on the menu and hand it over to the cashier. And then there’s the condiment bar similar to a hotpot restaurant. It is essential to take some of the pickled vegetable and parsley to go with the noodles. And if you like some spice, there’s the fermented bean chilli sauce which tasted like a spicy miso, and chopped fresh chilli which is not as spicy as it looks.

In Taipei, a city with an eclectic range of Chinese cuisine, the dish that inspires the greatest passion and most diverse opinion is undoubtedly beef noodle soup. After 1949, with a large number of soldiers from different areas of China migrating to Taiwan, veterans and their family members began to harness their skills of braising meat, which they learned in the army, combined with the flavours from their hometown and noodle-making skills. This paved the way to the creation of many versions of beef noodles that came with distinctive characteristics.

We ordered the Champion Beef Noodle Soup in a simple clear beef broth, and Regent Braised Beef Noodle Soup, their signature red braised broth. The bowls arrived promptly and were very good portions. Each bowl was filled to the brim with beefy broth and the servings of beef were more than adequate.

冠軍清燉牛肉麺 Champion Beef Noodle Soup is the version that won the competition back in 2012 under the “Clear Soup” category. At the time of his victory, Regent Taipei chef Zhang Ching-an was, at 24, the youngest chef to enter the competition. Zhang grew up on his grandmother’s clear-broth beef noodles, which he considers unsurpassable.

A trio of thick slices of slow-cooked Australian beef shank feature alongside bird’s nest fern, a crunchy and slightly bitter green from Taiwan’s mountains, and hand-pulled noodles. The winning recipe also has a French touch with three kinds of mushrooms sautéed in garlic butter and a lightly seasoned beef bone consommé that is deliciously drinkable down to the last spoonful.

There’s different categories to compete for- best traditional spicy braised, best clear broth, and most creative. Regent Braised Beef Noodle Soup 晶華紅燒牛肉麺 is original spicy braised version, a thick dark soup with American rib eye beef and tendon. A good bowl of beef noodle soup should have equally delicious sum of its parts – the broth, the noodles, the beef and the flavours all play a role. IMHO, the soup was overpowering everything in this version.

This is a typical half-beef, half-tendon red soup beef noodles that you can get in many stores, except the ingredients used are premium items. Instead of normal brisket, the beef used was American USDA ribeye cut. The egg was cooked like a Japanese ramen egg. Only the bokchoy was normal. The beef was also braised to meltingly tender, much like the pork found in Japanese pork bone ramen, kind of a waste to premium American ribeye.

As this version was invented in the Regent Taipei, the tripe was left out of the combination fearing that the foreigners staying in the hotel cannot fathom what this strange part was. However the beef tendon is still left in the beef noodle. Beef tendon is a difficult part to prepare as you need to get the timing right – too short, the tendon remains hard; too long, the tendon melts into the soup – the tendons were braised just right, not too soft not too hard as if the tendon was still alive.

Besides the beef noodles (which were not cheap from NT$480++ each), they came with a small side dish of New York Style Spicy Wanton 紐約抄手 as part of the promotion for the temporary exhibition of the collection from New York Mets Museum. Inspired by Regent Taipei’s Chairman’s school times in New York, the chef cleverly mixed in the rich and smooth peanut butter sauce with the homemade chili oil, which adds extra layers of flavour while eliminating the spiciness for their own version of Szechuan spicy wantons 红油抄手.

Shrimp Rolls 府城蝦捲 are filled with culinary memories of Tainan. 府城 (“capital city”) is the old name for Tainan, as the city was the old provincial capital from 1683–1887 under the Qing dynasty. They are golden and crispy on the outside, not greasy, and have a chewy and firm texture. Each roll is full of texture and deliciousness.

Princess and I always have the beef noodles when we visit the museum. The place gives up a nice environment to sit down and have an outstanding bowl of a Taiwanese classic. Although the price costs twice as much as those outside, but nevertheless it is delicious.

Champion Beef Noodle by Silks Palace 故宮晶華冠軍牛肉麵坊
No. 221, Section 2, Zhishan Road, Shilin District, Taipei City 台北市士林區至善路二段221號（故宫晶華B2）
Tel : +886-2-2882-9393

Visited Aug 2025