(The transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.)

Pat Boland: I'm really excited to be here because we're going to talk about three of my favorite things: New York City, hot sauce, and pizza. I am from Virginia, and I work for the U.S. government. I think that New York is a city that really represents the diversity, the multiculturalism of America. It really has the regular people from all around the world who have come to the city to make it their home and brought their delicious foods with them.

So really excited to be here with you all today.

Jane Chen: Thanks so much for having us. We're also big fans of New York City and of course, hot sauce and pizza.

Pat Boland: Maybe say a couple of words about your connections to New York.

Jane Chen: I grew up in Taipei. And when I went to college in upstate New York, New York City would be the only place where I could get food from Taiwan. I would wait for long weekends and ride the bus for four hours to go have soup dumplings. New York really started for me as an escape into somewhere where I could taste food from home.

Alex Denner: I wasn't born there, but I was bred there. I got there when I was one and a half. I grew up in Brooklyn and moved out to an outer suburb to get a better schooling, because going to a good school in New York City is notoriously difficult. After that, I got a job in New York City then moved back down.

I view New York as home. Wherever I am in the world, once I get back into New York, I start feeling the energy - the moment you get out on the street. You just see people walking with purpose, and you kind of fall back into a New York speed where everything is a little bit faster.

So you kind of speed up your entire life and speed up your thinking. It makes me calm. For a long time, I couldn't fall asleep unless there was a sound of like a siren going by or an ambulance. I generally just have only love for New York.

Pat Boland: That's really cool. For me, I live all around the world for my work. I’ve lived from Egypt to mainland China, to Syria, to Turkey. And New York is a city in which you can be in a place like Astoria, and you're passing by an Egyptian cafe that looks like it could be in downtown Cairo. Then later that day, go to Flushing and have the best Chinese or Taiwanese food that tastes just like it would in Asia.

It's really a special place where different peoples and cultures are passing by each other on the street or on the subway. I think that the food’s traditions they bring also cross-pollinates and create some really special stuff.

Alex, Brooklyn is a really diverse place. You've some of the different communities I mentioned, then you've got large Jewish communities, you've got Latin American communities in like Sunset Park. What was that like growing up there?

Alex Denner: So my parents moved to a neighborhood in Brooklyn called Decker Heights. It's sandwiched between Bensonhurst and Bayridge. At that time, it was Italian-American heavy. My parents cooked a lot, so I had a lot of Eastern European, Russian, Jewish sort of mix. But then the treats would be going to an American diner and getting a burger, or going up a block to the local Americanized Chinese food, not understanding that that was a very specific thing in itself. Every once in a while, going out to Brighton Beach and actually getting fancy Russian food, like banquet-style Russian food.

So yeah, I had a pretty big smattering of cuisines thrown at me. And I think it really helped reinforce that food is just a way of love because it's an easy way to show different cuisines. I was really lucky to grow up in that area.

Pat Boland: That's really cool. You have this broad idea of what food is, and I think it helps make one open to new foods, and to travel and bring those familiar tastes wherever you go. Jane, how did your experience differ from Alex?

Jane Chen: As I moved into New York, it was like a gateway to opening up that global palette. It was incredible to have food from home just one subway ride away, but also to experience Ethiopian food in Brooklyn, or really good Korean food in K-Town. Having that as part of my regular dining experience, even for a short six years, was really eye-opening. It really defined I would say my eating habits even to this day.

Pat Boland: How about when you were in college? Did you get introduced to any sort of new American foods that you just hadn't had before?

Jane Chen: So many. Anybody from Ithaca would probably remember this thing called DP Dough. It's a calzone, and as college students we all eat pretty much calorie-loaded junk food.

Pat Boland: To soak up that beer.

Alex Denner: The legend was that they used a stick of butter per calzone.

Pat Boland: Wow.

Jane Chen: So this concept of a calzone was really new to me. I remember going into first week in college, looking at the salad bar and just being in awe of the amount of salad dressings that were available there.

I remember vividly for the first two weeks of college in America, I basically ate fries. Because that was the one thing I knew.

Pat Boland: The American college dining hall can be overwhelming even if you're from the United States.

Jane Chen: Yeah.

Pat Boland: And would you say there's a particular dish that you would call the New York dish?

Jane Chen: Definitely classic, like, dollar slice pizza. Two Bros in New York was one of the first things I ate when I visited New York City. But over time, whenever I think about New York now, pizza and pasta for me for sure. Just really comfy, heartwarming bowl of pasta is how I remember New York as well.

Alex Denner: Very true. But if I'm pressed, I'm also going to say, it's a toss up between a bagel or a bodega. So if you want to go to a bodega, you can always get your B-E-C (bacon, egg, and cheese) on a roll. They’ll ask you “S-P-K?” That’s salt, pepper, ketchup. Personally, I was always S-P-Hot Sauce. So if you live near a good bagel place, get a bagel. If you live near a bodega, most likely the bodega is going to be a good option.

Pat Boland: I've been to a lot of different places around the world, from Yemen and Jordan to Turkey, Spain, and Mexico. And New York is this place where the vastness of the world feels like it can be condensed into. And so my brother lives there. Every time I come back from living posted abroad, I’d go spend a lot of time in New York.

But I was wondering, you have lived there for long periods of time. So I want to ask your suggestions, how would you spend a day in New York? Maybe some of the more off-the-beaten-track things that would incorporate some good food?

Jane Chen: As you asked the question, the things that pop into my mind are just the restaurants I would visit. On a recent visit to New York, we stopped at East Village because that's where we used to live. There's a lot of food in that area. You can go from East Village down to the Lower East Side, because the best thing to do in New York is to walk.

Ride the subways NQR or 4,5,6 get to 14th Street. And then you walk from 14th Street down to Delancey and just eat your way down. That's my favorite thing to do in New York.

Alex Denner: I would say any good day would include a trip to an outdoor biergarten. The beauty of New York is that when you live there, you have a lot more options. But when you visit, you kind of need to hit the sites.

There's a great place in Ridgewood, Queens where it gets a bunch of food trucks to come in. They also have music acts and a few beers on tap, so you can just go, sit, have some food, chat, and then drink away the day.

Jane Chen: The experiences that I love about New York I similarly love in Taipei as well. When it's a great day out, everybody goes out to have a nice meal to catch up, have beer. It's like the outdoor biergarten experience, like the 熱炒 (re-chao) experience in Taiwan, where you're just hanging out and having a good time.

Eating your way through the city is also similar to how we eat our way through a night market or the different areas of Taipei.

Pat Boland: Both cities have great public transit and great street food cultures. The night markets here in Taipei each have their own specialty, just like different neighborhoods might in New York City. I'd love to see if you guys have Google maps of your favorite places, both in New York and Taipei.

Alex Denner: It's a travesty, too many pins.

Jane Chen: We have a full list we usually send people based on where they’re staying. These are our favorite places. For example, like pizza, Joe's Pizza in New York is our favorite.

They have a couple of places, but our favorite is on 14th Street in Union Square. The original is in the West Village. They also have a couple in Financial District.

Pat Boland: Okay, two other New York classics. Do you have a favorite: bagels and cheesecakes?

Alex Denner: For bagels, I have an off-the-beaten path. It's where I grew up in Rockland County, New York. So there's a bakery called Rockland Bakery.

You can pick the bagels off the line, so they're still hot and fresh. Everyone knows that a bagel has a two-hour half life. If you eat it a little bit later than that, it's not as good. There's also that thing, you can’t toast a bagel in New York. You get a fresh bagel and you go to the Deli right next door, and be like, can you please put cream cheese on this. But really, if it's right off the line, you can just eat it fresh by itself. And it is the most glorious experience.

So I would recommend taking a 30-45 minute drive out of New York City up to Rockland. Go to Rockland Bakery and just get a fresh bagel - whatever flavor it is, it doesn't really matter. That's the one you want to get.

Pat Boland: I just put that in my Google Maps.

Jane Chen: For cheesecake: Veniero’s is our choice. It's in East Village. It's very classic New York cheesecake where it doesn't have that graham cracker crust. The cheesecake is super fluffy. It's really nice.

Alex Denner: It’s still dense, right? It’s still a New York cheesecake.

Pat Boland: How do you think the trends in the food scene in New York have changed

Jane Chen: Over COVID we didn't get the chance to go back to New York. We went back first chance we could last September. It was really amazing just to see the amount of Asian forward restaurants. There's a lot of folks trying to bring specifically Taiwanese food into New York. That's been really incredible to see.

There are places where you can get really basic, for example, fantuan 飯糰 (riceballs), but they really dress them up. So it's American culture as well. That's the kind of food innovation you can really enjoy in New York. It's this clashing of cultures, and the new that comes out of it.

Pat Boland: So like a Nathan's Hot Dog inside of a fantuan 飯糰?

Alex Denner: I could see that working.

Jane Chen: That should be a thing.

Alex Denner: With some mustard? Why not?

Pat Boland: How about you, Alex?

Alex Denner: I want to build on Jane's point. Since New York is already a multicultural melting pot to begin with, everyone kind of grows up eating multiple cultures.

So when they get bitten by the bug to start a restaurant, or start a food concept, they don't pull just from their own cuisine. That might be their truth, their bedrock, but they're going to be like... Well, I ate this growing up, I ate that growing up, and I want to see how I can pull in those flavors. That kind of blending actually creates - I wouldn't really call it fusion - but it's an evolution of where everyone is pulling from different cuisines. I think the ability to create new foods is only limited by your imagination.

Pat Boland: We've been talking a lot about New York, a lot about pizza as representative food of New York. And it just so happens that we have some pizza here. We're going to take this opportunity because we've got the two founders of Empress Hot Sauce here to first try the pizza and then to pair it.

Jane Chen: I think any hot sauce, it has to be designed to be good with pizza. So I'm excited for us to try it.

By the looks of it, it's really got that thin crust. I'm very excited to try.

So if you hold it, there's a little bit of a flop, right? It's not too stiff. The texture is soft. My favorite to pair with pizza is actually the Smoky Hibiscus. It has that smoky flavor, a little bit of garlic, and just a slight sweetness. It's just mild enough in heat, so I can still enjoy the pizza. That's my preference.

Alex Denner: If I’m feeling spicy, I can actually do the Maqaw. I can do a corner and just do a dip and a dab.

Jane Chen: How spicy do you normally eat?

Pat Boland: I actually have a bottle of the Smoky Hibiscus in my fridge. So basically I bring hot sauces to the table for every meal. So everything needs at least a little bit. But I don't have my grandma's tolerance, who would just like to eat Jalapenos and Habaneros for snacks during the day.

So like you, it's got to have some little bit of sting, but I don't want to be just totally overwhelmed because then you can't taste the food.

Jane Chen: That's basically the ethos of our sauces. So that's fantastic.

Pat Boland: This pizza is looking pretty authentic. Let’s give it a taste.

Alex Denner: From a pizza perspective, the key to a good New York pizza is a slow, cold fermentation of the dough. So immediately in my book, this is already a win.

And then the sauce. New York sauce is actually a little bit sweeter than you would expect. A little bit thinner than you'd expect. So doing that also builds upon that nostalgia of what New York pizza is supposed to be. The cheese is great. I think they hit it out of the park all three ways.

Pat Boland: We're trying this on just a margarita pizza. So there's nothing to hide behind in terms of the ingredients. It's nice and chewy. I think the hot sauce adds another level. You can feel it kind of burning a little bit on the top of the mouth, but also the smoky flavor, it rounds it out.

Alex Denner: So the hibiscus sauce that we use is a little bit more vinegar-forward. It plays with that sweetness a little bit. It counteracts it. So you don't get too much vinegar or too much sweetness. It mellows each other out and makes it a nice even approach. When you get that smokiness and that sweetness from the longan 龍眼, I think it creates a really nice pairing with a fatty cheese pizza.

Jane Chen: Making hot sauce in Taiwan allows us to test all of our sauces with Asian food as well as Western food. And that's essentially how we ate in New York anyway, right?

I remember the first hot sauce we ever got. I didn't even know what to put it on. It was just very new to me. I added it to chicken over rice. It blew my mind. I remember the hot sauce was kind of like a Jamaican-style hot sauce. And chicken over rice is more, I would say, New York style. And so I just didn't think the two would mix.

I feel very lucky we get to do that almost every day here. That we get to use our own sauces and try a bunch of stuff and see if it works.

Pat Boland: In my refrigerator I have an entire cabinet of just hot sauces. I'll just bring like six at a time to the table. I'll just have one bite each time and figure out which is the best that pairs with Asian type food or more Western food.

Alex Denner: There is a moment of indecision when you look at the fridge; you’re like, which sauce am I taking out today?

Pat Boland: Yeah, it can be overwhelming. I used to get a lot of eye rolls from my mom when I would do that. But my wife is a little more understanding. Should we try another one of the sauces?

Jane Chen: I think the mango could be a good fit. We use Irwin mango 愛文芒果. It’s actually originally from Florida, and then a researcher brought it to Taiwan in the 1950s. We have the perfect climate to grow it, and this whole town in Tainan just started to develop this fruit locally in Taiwan.

Pat Boland: This one's a little bit thicker than the Hibiscus. Is it because mangoes are thicker?

Alex Denner: Yeah, there's no water added to the sauce. So it's just mangoes, ginger, vinegar and a bit of carrots for body.

Pat Boland: And which pepper?

Jane Chen: All of our sauces are made with local Taiwanese chaotianjiao 朝天椒 (facing heaven pepper) as a base. Some of the sauces have Ghost Pepper just to amp up the floralness or the heat.

Alex Denner: You really taste it because it starts emanating from the back of the throat forward. After about five seconds, the sweetness of the mango takes over. Once that recedes, you get that spice coming from the back.

Jane Chen: This is the first sauce that Alex ever made.

When we moved to Taiwan, he had brought back all of these hot sauces, like Mango Habanero is a big one in the U.S. So he had a bottle of that in Taiwan and he was running low. So when he went to the markets in the morning, he was like, well, there's mangoes here, and here's peppers, so maybe I can make my own.

Lo and behold, he actually did it. And our friends really enjoyed it. The rest was history.

Pat Boland: When did you all start this?

Jane Chen: About two and a half years ago.

Alex Denner: I honestly was just messing about with different things. I was making Kombucha, fermenting different things. I just wanted to give myself a bit of time to play around with food. I was actually working on a different food concept at the time.

Jane came home one day, and I was covered in pomegranate juice. I was getting it all on the table, on the walls. It looked like a crime scene. She came and said: "Oh, are you working on this other thing that we were doing at the time?"

And I just go: “No, no, I'm making hot sauce”. At that moment, she gave me a weird look. I think at that moment, it clicked that I was actually more passionate about making hot sauce than what we were doing. I think at that point, she gave me license to be like, okay, try this out, see what happens. And about six to seven months later, we came out with Empress.

Jane Chen: The third sauce is actually the Pineapple-Miso that he created. It's a really great example of how we approach making sauces.

We wanted it to represent something that could be added to Taiwanese food. Then Alex started realizing that there were a lot of similarities between Mexican food and Taiwanese food. There's a lot of pork. There's a lot of sweetness in even savory dishes, and a lot of herbs, right?

So with these similar taste profiles, he kind of bottled it up into one hot sauce.

Instead of pork, he used white miso to create that savory flavor. And pineapple - of course Taiwan is really famous for pineapple. And we added a bit of cilantro to create that herbaceous flavor. This sauce is now one of my best sellers in Taiwan, also in the US - just because of the way that the flavors speak to everybody.

Pat Boland: Let's try it. What would you put this on?

Alex Denner: I really enjoy this on fish and on salads. On luroufan 滷肉飯 (minced pork on rice) or louwei 滷味 (braising in a sauce) is also fantastic, which is a testament to how the sauce works between both cultures. It might be Mexican inspired with Taiwanese ingredients, but it works amazingly on Taiwanese dishes.

Pat Boland: I don't know if we're going to try the hottest ones. But I’m game if you are.

Jane Chen: Should we try the spiciest and see if we can do it?

So this is our ghost pepper Maqaw hot sauce. We use this black pepper-looking berry, mountain berry called Maqaw, which is traditionally used in indigenous cultures in Taiwan when they steam fish. So that's the floral flavor you're getting. Then we add a little sweet potato, so it has a nice silky texture to it.

Oftentimes when you want something that's really hot, I hate that I'm eating a wet, soggy mess. This sauce doesn't. That sweet potato allows you to have just dabs of a perfect amount of heat and with a nice floral brightness. Then the ghost pepper brings it home with that fire in your mouth.

Pat Boland: For sure. It's fiery. It's not, but it's not deadly. All these are really good, really diverse.

I’ve lived in Taiwan for some years now to see the incorporation of really famous local flavors and ingredients; the pineapples, the passion fruits, the Maqaw. It's really unique. So hats off to you guys for this project.

Thanks guys for letting us sample your delicious sauces on my favorite food: pizza. Maybe we can zoom out a little bit and about the history of hot sauce in the United States and Taiwan.

Alex Denner: I like to equate the growth of hot sauce in terms coffee, the different waves of coffee. So the first wave of hot sauce was everyone in their regional cuisine, right? Whether that be Louisiana style, or Mexican hot sauce.

The second wave would be the mass market approach. So that's when you have Tabasco and becoming a brand leader; like El Yucateco from Mexico, kind of defining what that local flavor is. And then the third wave would be craft. Craft based on the amount of Scovilles that they could push.

Pat Boland: Scoville?

Alex Denner: Scoville is like the measurement of spice.

Pat Boland: So it’s scientific?

Alex Denner: It is. Yeah. Ghost Peppers are roughly a million. Jalapenos are like 2,500. Good base numbers. It measures how spicy an item is based on the amount of capsaicin it holds. Capsaicin is the oil inside of a pepper that determines how spicy it is. So that third wave of craft was basically fully focused on pumping as much Scovilles into a bottle of hot sauce as possible.

What I've seen over the past ten, twelve years, is a transformation towards the fourth wave, where it's along the lines of flavor first, spice second. Then figuring out how to get the most out of ingredients.

Pat Boland: Yeah, it is. I remember there was Mexican chain in the States that had a wall of different hot sauces. When I go to a place like that, I always get quesadillas because it has the most surface area for trying the different hot sauces. I remember so many of them were sassy cartoons like “blow your face off”. I've been away from the States for a while. So I haven't really seen the fourth wave as much.

The elephant in the room is that we're just coming out of the COVID pandemic. I think living here in Taiwan. It felt pretty safe. But another thing that happened during the pandemic was a lot more people stayed home, right? So you started the business in the midst of the pandemic. That's kind of a courageous thing to do when the world is facing economic troubles.

So maybe you could talk about some of the challenges you faced?

Jane Chen: Compared to the world, it was relatively easy for us to start a business in Taiwan in the middle of the pandemic. In the States, there were so many supply shortages. And, of course, there was all this reporting on Sriracha running out on shelves and labor shortages. So I think we got very lucky to be in Taiwan at the right place at the right time to be able to launch Empress.

But definitely, what did impact us were shipping times, because once we started exporting to the U.S., the shipment scheduling became really challenging. We have an amazing partner in the U.S. so they took the brunt of it. But it was hard to understand how to plan our production around the shipping traffic.

Pat Boland: You mean the actual container ships?

Jane Chen: Actual container ships. And scheduling it, and making sure that the prices aren't outrageous. We are a consumer product, so we don't have a crazy margin. So it was definitely challenging for us.

Alex Denner: We're really lucky that we can lean on Taiwan for a lot of our produce. I'd say 90% of our ingredients come from Taiwan. So we avoided shipping issue inbound. We're very blessed to have very few items we rely on for import.

Pat Boland: The COVID pandemic also provided, I think, some opportunities. More people cooking at home, more people experimenting in their own kitchens. As we come to the end of our discussion, if you could talk about some of the things that you don't think would have been possible if the pandemic didn't happen.

Jane Chen: One of the examples we experienced is people's knowledge of Taiwan. I remember when I was going to college, way back when I would say “Taiwan” people really didn't know about us and about this island. And then this time around, we did tastings, people really chimed into Taiwan, that Taiwan has great food.

Alex Denner: I think the fact that people were stuck at home is sort of a boom to almost every single ethnic cuisine. Because at the end of the day, you're going to get very bored of eating the same thing. Even if you dip, like a toe into that water, that's already some sort of growth that you have from a food perspective.

And I think people really want that kind of spice of life. So when they're stuck, they're always going to look for something new.

Pat Boland: I've eally enjoyed my conversation with you guys, discussing our favorite city, eating our favorite food, and trying your delicious hot sauce, which are quickly becoming my favorite hot sauce. So thank you for your time. Thanks to Ghost Island Media for arranging this. Tune in to the next AIT podcast.

Jane Chen: Thanks so much.

Alex Denner: Thanks so much.

This episode is produced by Emily Y. Wu. Teresa Yen is our production coordinator and editor. Our editing assistant is Gerald Williams. Engineering supervisor is Dino Lin. Graphics by Logan Dosher. Thanks to Chloe Ramond and Mikey Redding for assisting.