Food & Wine USA - (07)July 2020

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RIGG BROWN STARTED WORKING in kitchens at the age

of 15 as a bored high school student in rural Virginia,

looking for a way to pay for gas. He continued cook-

ing in kitchens while studying English literature at the

University of Virginia, eventually landing a job at Tom Colicchio’s

Colicchio & Sons in New York City before moving on to chef Justin

Smillie’s beloved Cal-Ital spot, Upland. So naturally, Brown’s next

move was to open Win Son, a groundbreaking Taiwanese American

restaurant in a far-flung corner of Brooklyn, having never visited the

island nation until just months before opening. Wait, what?

Swapping pork chops for pork buns makes more sense than you

might think. One summer at a barbecue in Brooklyn, Brown met

his business partner Josh Ku, a Taiwanese American who worked in

property management. The two bonded over their love of motorcycles

and Taiwanese food, and they started exploring every Taiwanese

restaurant they could find in Flushing. “We were just getting stoned

and going to eat food, but it evolved into something more,” he says.

The pair would dissect what made a dish Taiwanese specifically

or what techniques and ingredients were involved. Ku would bring

over his mom’s recipes, like a celery and tofu dish, and Brown would

reverse engineer dishes they ate at their favorite Taiwanese restaurants,

cooking elaborate meals for their friends on his days off. Brown and

Ku hadn’t planned on opening a Taiwanese restaurant, but when Ku

struggled to rent out a space in Bushwick, they both knew they had an

opportunity. “We weren’t trying to start a fad or get on a trend,” says

Brown. “We just wanted to bring food we loved to our neighborhood.”

As the lines around the block attest, they amply succeeded. In the

course of opening Win Son, Brown became an astute student of the

food and the history of Taiwan, and today he can easily hold court on

the influences on Taiwanese cuisine from the Ming dynasty to World

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win son and win son bakery,

new york city

Trigg Brown at Win Son

in New York City

opposite: Clams with

Shiro Dashi and Basil

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PHOTOGRAPHY BY GARY HE