Lin-Sanity and the Taiwanese Te-Bao

Eddie Huang always knew that when Jeremy Lin hit it big he’d call the player’s sandwich “The Taiwanese Te-Bao.”

The Taiwanese Te-Bao (yum!!)

“I called him the Taiwanese Tebow because I knew he was super Christian,” says Huang, a Taiwanese-Chinese American whose New York restaurant BaoHaus serves the traditional Taiwanese dumplings called bao. He’d been working on the sandwich — a curried pork chop, pickled daikon and carrot, jalapenos and cilantro – since the Knicks brought on Lin in December. “We finally we got it right with this pork chop.”

Huang says he and his friends in the Asian community have been following Lin since Sports Illustrated wrote about him in 2009. “My thing with Jeremy is that it’s such a huge breakthrough for us,” says Huang, who is a lifelong (and therefore long-suffering) Knicks fan. “There are not many of us who are physically dominant. The last one I remember is Bruce Lee. It’s a step in the right direction. We’re not all guys with glasses and pocket protectors.” (Though it’s highly likely that Harvard graduate Lin has a pocket protector stashed somewhere.)

So what happens when Lin cools off? Will the Taiwanese Te-Bao be whisked from the BaoHaus lineup, benched like just another fading player?

“The sandwich is part of the menu,” Huang says passionately, “it’s never coming off.”

It’s a Lin-stitution.

Read more about Lin-spired food and drink in a recent piece I did for Associated Press.