YuDao

Seven days on the milkfish

Milkfish rests for seven days before it reaches the tartare course. Nick Yang, chef at YuDao in Taipei, uses that wait to pull a familiar Tainan fish into a quieter register, raw and smoked, with house-made crisps, dried cauliflower, and cauliflower purée. The restaurant itself works from Yuguang Island in Anping District, Tainan; the cooking belongs to the sandbar, the farm, and the coast around the room.

Yang’s lineage is not presented through a named master. It runs through place. Before YuDao, he founded Sinasera 24 in Taitung, where his kitchen held to French-inspired restraint, farm-to-table sourcing, seasonal markets, and the discipline of letting the ingredient arrive before the flourish. At YuDao, that grammar widens into modern New Taiwanese cooking. The restraint remains, but the archive changes: childhood memory, local climate, coastal habits, and the layered food history of Tainan become material at the pass.

Recognition before explanation

The YuDao menu moves by specific ground rather than by category. Cigu milkfish, venison from Tainan’s Nansi District, Changbin prawn torched à la minute, Nansi Sika deer tsukune, abalone and coconut soup under puff pastry, black pork with a crust built for savor: the names carry their own map. A rice course folds Kaohsiung No. 139 rice with herbs from the restaurant’s farm and browned butter, then sets it beside house-made pickles and foxtail grass milkfish bone broth. The farm on Yuguang Island supplies herbs and keeps a chicken coop, bringing the kitchen’s sourcing close enough to affect the day’s station.

In 2026, Michelin Guide Taiwan awarded Yu Dao one Michelin star, Opening of the Year, and a Green Star. Those are facts attached to this house, not borrowed aura. They mark the same ethic that followed Yang from Taitung: eat with the seasons, source from the land, and let a Taiwanese ingredient keep its memory even when the technique comes through a French lens.

The room beside the shore

The restaurant occupies a renovated part of the former Mao House guesthouse on Yuguang Island, with exposed concrete, a full-height glass façade, a generous courtyard, and a minimalist dining room. The room does not need to stage the island. Light crosses the concrete, the glass keeps the outside near, and the sea breeze belongs to the meal’s pace rather than its decoration.

Yuguang was once known as Kunshen, a sandbar off the southwest coast of Tainan City. The island is quiet, close to a fishing harbor, and known for sunset over the Taiwan Strait. Inside YuDao, that geography is not scenery; it is the bench note behind the tartare, the rice, the prawn, the venison. The old capital gives Yang a different inheritance from Taitung, less a departure than a second set of hands on the same method.

The course that keeps the island close

Yang’s next movement here is best read course by course, because the restaurant’s clearest argument is still the plate in front of the guest. When the kitchen folds farm herbs into Kaohsiung No. 139 rice and sends it with foxtail grass milkfish bone broth, YuDao’s discipline becomes plain: the long way, kept close to Yuguang Island.