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Kai Eatery owner Allen Yeh. Photo / Dean Purcell

Amanda Saxton visits the Taiwanese street food joint has grown from food stall to franchise.

Kai Eatery is best known for its juicy, face-sized fried chicken breasts, but I'm here to rhapsodise over what should be dubbed the Taiwanese Happy Meal. It is also a burger (of sorts), fries and a drink, but a million times more interesting than anything from old McD's. It's what you might eat when wandering the street food markets of Taipei.

Standing in for a hamburger is the gua bao (pronounced "gwa bow"). These perfectly pillowy steamed buns taste best overflowing with pork belly, pickles, crushed peanuts, and cucumber (the Taipei, $10.50). So many textures and flavours galore, biting into one is deeply satisfying. Kai Eatery's fries are cut from orange Beauregard kumara ($8) — the same type used in Taiwan — and taste uncannily sweet. This is because, instead of salt, they're coated in powdered plum. Embrace them as a dessert, I say! Custardy interiors contrast beautifully with crispy casings. Your drink will be milky bubble tea ($7.50), equipped with an extra-wide straw for sucking up tapioca pearls (the bubbles). My go-to flavour is brown sugar, but matcha, taro, and dreamy egg pudding are great too. Everything is very takeaway friendly.

The picture atop Kai Eatery's sturdy gua bao boxes pleases me greatly. What looks to be a dead bear is draped between the jaws of a bao, next to the words "no pain, no gain". At first, I took it as a refreshingly blunt characterisation of meat eating: animals die, which is sad, but boy are they delicious.

The eatery's owner Allen Yeh, who is simultaneously a pharmacist, says this is not the message he's trying to get across. The bear, a Formosan Black — endemic to Taiwan, named 'Formosa' by Portuguese sailors — is in fact sleeping (there are in fact three tell-tale Zs). And 'no pain, no gain' is a Taiwanese mantra adopted by those who fled mainland China for the island after defeat by the Communist Party in 1949. "Those guys started from scratch and made Taiwan a very prosperous place, so we've made it our mantra too," 37-year-old Yeh explains. The snoozing bear is a cheeky acknowledgement that even the hardest workers have to sleep sometimes.

Yeh and his wife, Tanya Huang, 31, migrated from the city of Taichung to New Zealand as kids. As adults, they hankered after Taiwanese street food — devoured on family trips back to the motherland — and felt it was under-represented in gastronomically diverse Auckland. Everyone knows bubble tea, but Taiwanese food tends to be a poorly executed gua bao at generic "Asian fusion" restaurants. The lightbulb went off soon after the couple's wedding.

In late 2015, as newlyweds, Yeh and Huang flew to Taiwan on a food finding mission. They spent three months eating everything, and returned to Auckland with favourite recipes in hand. Yeh's mum helped them perfect their recipes.

Kai Eatery began as a stall at the Auckland night markets, with Yeh working full-time at a pharmacy. Each evening, he'd drive across the city to wherever the market was being held, meet Huang, and serve authentic Taiwanese street food to a growing mob of enthusiastic customers. Then the couple would clean up, pack up, and arrive home — often after midnight — exhausted.

"It was like moving house every night," says Yeh. "Our dream was to give Kai Eatery a permanent home."

In 2017, a shipping container the colour of ripe mandarins was kitted out for that purpose — on Rutland St, in the CBD. That same year, Yeh and Huang were head-hunted by Precinct, Commercial Bay's developer, and agreed to set up shop in the swanky new shopping mall. "That was our 'we've made it moment'," says Yeh. But they haven't stopped growing: this aspiring Asia Tiger is now a booming four-branch franchise.

Yeh and Huang consider themselves true Taiwanese-Kiwis and subtly melded both cultures into their brand name. While kai is obviously the Māori word for food, it's also the sound of "to enjoy" in Mandarin, says Yeh. You'll spy the verb's Chinese characters inside the dot of kai's i.

Level 2 Commercial Bay, 7 Queen St, CBD 11am-8pm, Mon-Sun 09 222 2689 1 Rutland St, CBD 11.30am-7pm, Mon-Sat 09 948 2192 74 Taharoto Rd, Smale's Farm, Takapuna 11.30am-7pm, Mon-Fri 12pm-7pm Sat 09 930 0751 Millennium Centre, 604 Great South Rd, Ellerslie 11.30am-7pm, Mon-Fri 12pm-7pm Sat 09 222 3332 kaieatery.co.nz

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