McDonald's (Mai Dang Le): The Taiwanese Burger Joint That Preceded the Original at Taipei Main Station by Six Years

30-Second Overview: On July 8, 1978, an American-style fast-casual restaurant named "Mai Dang Le" (麥當樂) opened on Zhongxiao West Road, opposite the Hilton Hotel in front of Taipei Main Station. It served burgers, fries, and milkshakes, employing an open kitchen, mechanized preparation, and second-floor seating, aiming to compress a lunch meal into just over ten minutes. Six years later, the American McDonald's officially opened its first store in Taiwan. Today, people often refer to Mai Dang Le as a "knock-off McDonald's," but this shorthand obscures a more noteworthy fact: before international chain brands entered the market, local Taiwanese entrepreneurs were already imagining whether people in the city could rearrange their lunches around burgers, fries, and milkshakes.

That Store Was Not in the U.S., But in Front of Taipei Main Station

The term "Mai Dang Le" (麥當樂) had a dual usage in early sources, which cannot be retroactively inferred solely through today's brand names. In a 1978 Economic Daily News report on the opening of the local store, the Taiwanese store was written as "Mai Dang Le," while simultaneously stating that Chen Chin-ting obtained the recipe from a regional manager friend who "served at the American McDonald's Company." The report further claimed that the burger meat and milkshake ingredients of the Taiwanese store were "exactly the same as those of the American McDonald's." In other words, newspapers at the time indeed also translated the American McDonald's as "Mai Dang Le"; in the same report, "American McDonald's" referred to the U.S. company, while "Taiwanese McDonald's" referred to the local restaurant in front of Taipei Main Station. ¹

By the time of a 1983 United Daily News retrospective, the headline had clearly read "Mai Dang Le Is Not McDonald's," with the body further stating that the Mai Dang Le near Taipei Main Station was "not a branch of the American McDonald's." Therefore, this article adopts a chronological distinction: "American McDonald's" in 1978 materials was the early Chinese name for McDonald's; "Mai Dang Le" in front of Taipei Main Station was the local Taiwanese store operated by Meiduo Le Food Company; and "McDonald's" (麥當勞) after 1983 was the official American brand name used in Taiwan. This approach preserves both the literal wording of early newspapers and the established nature of later brand names. ^{2 1}

First, clarify the names: Mai Dang Le is not McDonald's. The first store of the American McDonald's in Taiwan opened on January 28, 1984, at the Minsheng Center on Minsheng East Road in Taipei; Mai Dang Le, however, had already been in business in front of Taipei Main Station on July 8, 1978. The two differ by nearly six years, but because their Chinese names are similar and their meals are alike, they were later placed into the same story for comparison. ^{3 2}

Mai Dang Le's first store was located around numbers 91–93, Section 1, Zhongxiao West Road, Taipei City, positioned on the first floor of the Taipei Main Station Highway East Station, opposite the Hilton Hotel. This address was not on the urban fringe, but rather the most accessible traffic node in Taipei at the time for encountering crowds. For a brand selling "quick lunches," being in front of a station was not merely a store location, but an entrance that concentrated commuting, tourism, work, and novelty-seeking. ¹

"Fast-Casual" Is No Small Matter, But a Redesign of Lunch

The original 1978 report did not describe it merely as a store selling burgers, but called it an "American Fast-Casual Nutrition Meal Center." The report, titled "Machines Make Fast Lunches, Chefs Are All College Graduates," emphasized that customers could take away or sit on the second floor to finish a lunch in just over ten minutes. This phrasing reveals what the entrepreneurs truly wanted to sell at the time: not just beef in bread, but a time system compatible with industrial and commercial society. ¹

Mai Dang Le featured burgers, fries, and milkshakes. The store had an open kitchen where customers took plates to get food, and after eating, concentrated paper wrappers and cups into trash bins. This process, from ordering, preparation, pickup to cleanup, was broken down into explicit steps, differing from traditional Taiwanese restaurants where the kitchen completed the cooking and waiters served it to the table. It turned "eating" into a production line that could be seen, managed, and accelerated. ¹

The original report also recorded that the entrepreneur claimed burgers left for over an hour would no longer be sold, appealing to hygiene through mechanized preparation and an open kitchen. These contents are the company's claims at the time and do not equate to today's independent food safety inspections; but they remain important because they show that 1970s Taiwanese consumers were beginning to encounter the modern culinary language of "standardization, predictability, and speed." ¹

Source: *Economic Daily News*, Page 5, July 16, 1978; reprinted by United Daily News System's "Newspaper Time"

A Textile Entrepreneur Spent Five Months First Making Burgers

Founding Background: From Textile Inspections to Culinary Experiments

Chen Chin-ting's cross-industry shift did not start from a mature culinary chain, but from life differences seen during inspections. Contemporary reports described Western and American lunches as simple foods like sandwiches and burgers, contrasting them with Taiwan's then-lunches, which were traditional outside meals requiring more time and more dishes. This comparison carries the value judgments of 1978 corporate reporting and cannot be directly taken as a statistical description of the entire society; but it does explain how Mai Dang Le found its market rationale: framing "saving time" as a need of industrial society, and framing "speed" as a progressive lifestyle. ¹

Equipment and Supply Chain Behind the Products

Mai Dang Le's ambition was not just in its facade. The original report stated that the store imported some production machines and original factory ingredients from the U.S., and incorporated burger meat, milkshake ingredients, and fry processes into the same preparation routine. This distinguished it from general restaurants that merely added a burger dish: it attempted to build a micro-system from ingredients, equipment to employee training. The data does not provide a complete supplier list, import quantities, or daily capacity, so this article retains only the newspaper's explicit statement of "imported machines and ingredients," without extrapolating its scale. ¹

The person behind Mai Dang Le was Chen Chin-ting, Chairman of Meiduo Le Food Company. According to a 1978 Economic Daily News report, he originally worked in the textile industry. Due to multiple business inspections to Europe and America, seeing locals solving lunch with sandwiches and burgers, he began to think whether Taiwan also needed an "American Fast-Casual Fast Food Center." ¹

This story has a very specific object: the burger and the potato. The report stated that Chen first obtained recipes, machines, and ingredient supply information from a friend who served as a regional manager at the American McDonald's Company, then spent five months researching beef and pork burgers, as well as the temperature and time for peeling, slicing, and frying potatoes. This was not merely translating a foreign menu into Chinese, but breaking down a production process mature in the U.S. and attempting to reassemble it in Taiwan. ¹

Once he believed the taste and methods were stable, he brought in four college graduates who had never entered a kitchen to teach them the preparation methods. Afterwards, the store hired management expert Zeng Songling as a consultant to train staff in reception etiquette, sales concepts, professional philosophy, management methods, and practical drills. In other words, Mai Dang Le did not imitate a single burger, but the entire organizational technology of "how to stably deliver burgers to customers." ¹

"Sit down and eat, no need to wait long." The slogan from the July 16, 1978 Economic Daily News report condensed Mai Dang Le's promise into a vernacular sentence with a Taiwanese Hokkien tone: no need to wait too long, just sit down and eat. This tone was closer to the distance between the store and customers at the time than "internationalization."

Why It Was Later Called a "Knock-off"

"Knock-off" (山寨) is a later label, not the self-positioning used by the store in 1978 newspapers. From existing reports, Mai Dang Le indeed heavily referenced the American McDonald's: the items were burgers, fries, and milkshakes; the processes and equipment were influenced by the American brand; it even obtained connections and supply information related to the American McDonald's. These similarities led later readers to naturally understand it as the "Taiwanese version of McDonald's." ¹

But saying it is merely a knock-off also misses the institutional background of the time. The American McDonald's did not officially open stores in Taiwan until 1984, while Mai Dang Le had already opened for business in 1978 with a local company, local address, and local staff. It was both an imitation and a pioneering local experiment: translating American fast food into lunches in front of Taipei Main Station, and translating American process language into training courses that Taiwanese staff could operate.

When the American McDonald's later entered Taiwan, the two names and two sets of brand identities collided head-on. United Daily News System articles described this process as a "trademark war," stating that Mai Dang Le gained an advantage in trademark disputes due to its earlier operation; however, currently directly searchable materials are mainly newspaper retrospectives and secondary compilations, insufficient for this article to write the litigation results, case numbers, or legal reasons as independent conclusions independently verified by court judgments. Therefore, a more precise statement is: there indeed existed conflicts between Mai Dang Le and the later-entering American McDonald's regarding brand names and market competition; regarding litigation details, caution at the historical material level should still be retained. ⁴

From One Store to the 1970s Urban Dining

Mai Dang Le's store location and service design can also be understood within a larger urban context. Taipei Main Station front was a place for transportation transfers, commercial activities, and the gathering of out-of-town populations. Opening a store there meant it did not need to first educate a fixed community, but instead contacted people with different purposes, incomes, and dietary experiences every day. Takeaway customers needed speed, those sitting on the second floor needed a space for short rest, and first-time novelty seekers needed to know how to order and pick up food. The in-store process was actually serving three types of customers with different senses of time simultaneously. This is a reasonable analysis made from store location and contemporary reports, not a customer classification directly recorded in existing materials. ¹

Furthermore, Mai Dang Le's "American-ness" was not a one-way cultural transplant. On one hand, it imitated the American McDonald's products and mechanized processes; on the other hand, it used a Chinese store name, Taiwanese staff, the location of Taipei Main Station, and the "nutrition lunch" language familiar to newspaper readers. This hybridity made it an early case of localization: foreign forms provided imagination, local operators decided how it entered daily life. By 1984, the American McDonald's brought a more complete global brand system to Taiwan, and the Taiwanese market truly entered competition between two different scales of fast-food models. ^{3 1 5}

Six Years Later, the Original Entered

Corn Soup: The Localized Answer Brought to Taiwan

The relationship between Mai Dang Le and the later Taiwan McDonald's can be seen more clearly through a bowl of corn soup. The official product page of Taiwan McDonald's currently lists "Corn Soup" in small and large sizes, describing its taste as "warm and sweet," and suggesting pairing with burgers, fries, or chicken nuggets. This confirms corn soup is part of Taiwan's current menu, but the official page does not state its launch year, global sales scope, or historical origin. ⁶

Regarding why it appeared in Taiwan, the existing checkable mainstream media statement is: the 1978 menu of Mai Dang Le in front of Taipei Main Station already had the "Chicken Floss Corn Soup" later referred to in reports; when the American McDonald's officially entered Taiwan in 1984, Taiwanese consumers were already familiar with pairing corn soup with fast food meals, so Taiwan McDonald's chose to keep this dish, making it part of the localized menu. TVBS summarized this process as "legalization on the spot," but that is a media colloquialism, not a legal conclusion officially announced by McDonald's. ⁷

This data requires special marking of evidence levels. The 1978 Economic Daily News, in its currently available full reprint text, explicitly recorded burgers, fries, milkshakes, machines, ingredients, and service processes, but did not directly list the item name "Chicken Floss Corn Soup" in visible text; "Chicken Floss Corn Soup" is currently a historical statement cited by 2025 mainstream media reports. Therefore, this article does not write "the 1978 original newspaper directly proved the corn soup item name," but rather "menu data cited by later media reports stated." Similarly, the reasonable explanation for corn soup eventually becoming a long-term product of Taiwan McDonald's is the brand's decision to inherit existing tastes and consumer habits for localization, but currently there are no official documents stating it as the sole reason. ^{1 7}

On January 28, 1984, the American McDonald's opened its first Taiwan store at the Minsheng Center on Minsheng East Road in Taipei. Taiwan McDonald's official retrospective stated that the Minsheng Center once created a world record for McDonald's single-week sales. United Daily News System historical reports also indicated that this store quickly attracted consumer attention after opening. The two sources jointly present not just single-store success, but an international chain brand entering the market with a complete brand identity, supply chain, operational standards, and global reputation. ^{3 8}

The globalization of the American McDonald's did not start from Taiwan. Its official historical records state that the McDonald brothers reduced the restaurant to a few items in 1948, establishing the Speedee Service System; in 1955, Ray Kroc opened the first McDonald's operated by him in Des Plaines, Illinois; in 1961, the company acquired the rights to the McDonald brothers' enterprise; in 1967, it began entering overseas markets such as Canada and Puerto Rico. ⁵

The difference between this system and Mai Dang Le lies in scale and replicability. Mai Dang Le had to be researched by one founder for five months, trained four employees, and then hired a consultant to establish the system. The American McDonald's had already turned standardized processes into an enterprise capability that could be replicated across borders. By the end of 2025, McDonald's Corporation's 10-K document recorded that there were globally 45,356 restaurants, of which approximately 95% were franchises. The company mainly expanded scale through franchising, brand standards, and operational systems. ⁹

Therefore, what Mai Dang Le ultimately lost was not necessarily just the taste of a certain burger. It faced a competitor capable of simultaneously mobilizing global brands, franchise systems, supply chains, advertising, and store experience. United Daily News System retrospectives stated that Mai Dang Le gradually lost its advantage after the American McDonald's entered, and finally closed. This ending can be understood as a pioneering local store encountering a chain system that had already completed globalization. ⁴

What Mai Dang Le Left Was Not Just "Being Earlier"

The name of Mai Dang Le itself also reflected how 1970s Taiwan received foreign dining culture. At that time, "burgers" were not yet the everyday option seen everywhere today; for many, it was a collection of movies, studying abroad, foreign hotels, and urban modernity. Mai Dang Le placed this imagination in front of Taipei Main Station, allowing people who did not need to go abroad to also contact foreign-style meals, service etiquette, and dining spaces in an afternoon. This inference is built on contemporary newspaper descriptions of its store location, menu, and service design, rather than generalizing all consumers' feelings into a single conclusion. ¹

If Mai Dang Le is only treated as a piece of trivia, the story stops at "it was six years earlier than McDonald's." But what is truly worth seeing is that in 1978 it accurately felt Taiwan society was changing: women were leaving kitchens to enter the workforce, commercial activities increased, lunch time became expensive, young people were willing to queue at the station for the sake of novelty, and restaurants began to treat hygiene, efficiency, politeness, and management as professional skills that could be trained. These are the descriptions of Mai Dang Le in original reports; although carrying a corporate promotional tone, they still left a slice of urban life at the time. ¹

It also reminds us that Taiwan's modern dining history did not start from the day international brands arrived. Contemporary reports wrote women's employment, lunch outside, and the time pressure of industrial society into Mai Dang Le's opening story; these sentences carried the purpose of the operator selling a new business, but still preserved the language of how people at the time defended fast food and understood changes in urban life: not because of laziness, but because time became more precious. Not just seeking cheapness, but hoping to obtain clean, convenient, and predictable meals within limited time. ¹

On the other hand, this article cannot romanticize Mai Dang Le as a problem-free local innovation. Its equipment, ingredients, and preparation methods were clearly influenced by the American McDonald's, and the brand name caused subsequent identity conflicts; the fact that "Taiwanese pioneer" and "imitator" can simultaneously hold true is precisely why this history should not be sealed by a single label. For these competitive relationships, this article adopts contemporary newspapers and later report retrospectives, not expanding legal details without original court judgments into certain answers. ^{1 4}

It also reminds us that Taiwan's modern dining history did not start from the day international brands arrived. The American McDonald's brought the complete version of global chains to Taiwan in 1984, indeed changing the fast-food market. But before that, local entrepreneurs were already attempting to understand what "quick meals" represented, and making it out with their own capital, personnel, and store fronts. Mai Dang Le's brief existence was precisely caught between imitation and innovation, local and global, pioneer and systematic competition.

This is also why looking at the word "knock-off" today requires a bit more distance. It points out the similarity between Mai Dang Le and McDonald's, but does not answer a larger question: when a place has no international brand, who has the right to first imagine the future lifestyle for this place?

A Timeline, Two "Firsts"

The temporal relationship between Mai Dang Le and McDonald's can be simply organized with the table below. The "first" here must have qualifiers: Mai Dang Le was the pioneer of early local burger specialty stores in Taiwan. The American McDonald's was the first to officially open stores as a transnational brand in Taiwan. If the two are mixed, it would turn historical layers of different levels into the same thing.

The first two rows in the table come from the same contemporary newspaper material; the third row is confirmed by the Taiwan McDonald's official timeline; the fourth row is the later retrospective of the United Daily News System. Therefore, the evidence strength of the first three dates and the narrative nature of the fourth row are not entirely the same. Marking the time distance of sources is an indispensable basic skill when writing local brand history. ^{3 2 1 4}

From Historical Materials to a Disappeared Store

The most precious material of Mai Dang Le is not the later circulated "whether it looks like McDonald's," but those details in the 1978 opening reports that were not quite like brand stories: second-floor seating, plates, aluminum foil-wrapped ketchup, trash bins, open kitchens, and employees first practicing how to greet customers. These details let us see that fast-food stores do not stand only by product names, but by a series of arrangements that make customers feel "no need to wait, can rest assured, know what to do next." ¹

The report also wrote "college graduates entering the kitchen" as news. This detail might be ordinary today, but placed back in 1978 it explained the entrepreneur's reimagining of culinary work: the kitchen was not only a place where masters spooned based on experience, but could also be a work site for training processes, measuring temperature, and controlling time. Mai Dang Le's modernity appeared precisely in these seemingly trivial operations, not only in English-style dish names or foreign-style decor. ¹

Of course, original newspapers are opening reports, not food science inspections, nor consumer surveys. Its descriptions of hygiene, nutrition, quality, and "not selling after one hour" belong to commitments proposed by the operator in the media and cannot be directly taken as objective measurement results. This article retains these words because they explain how the operator at the time persuaded society to accept fast food. This article does not rewrite them into conclusions exceeding the scope of materials such as "Mai Dang Le has been proven more hygienic." ¹

This reading also makes "knock-off" more precise. If knock-off only means copying, then Mai Dang Le's employee training, store design, and local operational context would be erased. If only writing it as a local entrepreneurship legend, the direct imitation and name conflicts brought by the American McDonald's would be beautified. A more complete judgment is: Mai Dang Le was an early fast-food brand influenced by the American McDonald's, pioneered by Taiwanese operators, and finally disappeared in global chain competition. These three parts must be retained simultaneously.

Similar Names Do Not Mean Identical History

Separating Mai Dang Le and McDonald's has another practical reason: similar names cause later materials to pollute each other. Some mistakenly labeled 1978 Mai Dang Le store photos as McDonald's; some backfilled the 1984 Minsheng Center opening record to the earlier local brand. This article's approach is to first separate by date and store location, then place "local pioneer" and "international entry" on the same timeline for comparison. This neither erases Mai Dang Le nor packages it as an independent invention unrelated to the American McDonald's. ^{3 2 1}

The materials left by Mai Dang Le also have clear blanks: currently directly obtainable content is mainly based on 1978 newspaper opening reports, later historical retrospectives, and community-preserved old photo clues; it lacks complete company archives, original menus, number of stores, closing date, and full text of court judgments. Therefore, this article does not speculate how many branches it once had, does not fill in unverified operating years for it, nor expands "Taiwan's first" into "the only one in Taiwan" or "the most successful." Similarly, this article does not treat later community retellings as direct testimony of the 1978 scene, but downgrades them to clues, focusing on parts confirmed by newspapers, official timelines, and publicly declared documents. For a disappeared brand, acknowledging the boundaries of materials is closer to reliable historical writing than filling blanks with pretty details. This is also why Taiwan.md prefers to leave question marks rather than process rumors into answers.

Ending: A Lunch of Over Ten Minutes in Front of the Station

The 1978 Mai Dang Le is no longer in business at numbers 91–93, Section 1, Zhongxiao West Road. The store front has disappeared, the original sign remains only in newspaper images and old customer memories. But that sentence "sit down and eat, no need to wait long" is still powerful. On the surface it speaks of speed, underneath it is actually time: a city that was speeding up began to demand that lunches also be redesigned.

Six years later, the original McDonald's came, the global system replaced the local pioneer's market position. But the sequence was not rewritten: it was not that Taiwan first wanted to eat burgers when McDonald's arrived. It was that someone in Taiwan had already, in front of the station, made burgers into a language acceptable to urban life.

Image Licenses and Further Reading

Taipei Main Station on Zhongxiao West Road: Wikimedia Commons Image Page, CC BY 2.0.jpg)

Taipei Main Station Exterior: Wikimedia Commons Image Page, CC BY-SA 3.0

Further Reading

Taiwan McDonald's Important Milestones: Official Timeline Starting from the 1984 Minsheng Center

McDonald’s History: American McDonald's Official Timeline

References