Hands-down, the greatest attraction of Taiwan, for me anyway, is the food (and the beverages, too). It’s delicious, it’s cheap, and it’s everywhere. I’ve already discussed my love of night markets and bubble tea. As with those posts, I’ll the pictures do most of the talking about Taiwan’s edibles and imbibables.
Street food
Although not a night market, Miaoqian Road (廟前路) in Kaohsiung similarly features lots of food stalls (20 April 2018).
Night markets aren’t the only place to find street food in Taiwan, although they do concentrate lots of it conveniently into a small area. Here are some of my favorite dishes:
Scallion pancakes (蔥油餅), aka “Chinese pizza,” are a favorite of mine. At their simplest, they’re a flat, round, pan-fried cake about as big around as a medium-size pizza. Minced scallions (small onions) and garlic are mixed in. When lightly browned, the vendor chops them into 8 wedges like pizza slices and stuffs them in paper or plastic. You eat them with your fingers. This one here is gussied up with added fried egg and hot sauce (20 April 2018).
This is maybe the best piece of fried chicken I ever ate in my life, with the exception of Kentucky Nuggets, which my Mom would sometimes buy me back in the ’80s when we drove into Portland. (KFC: Bring back Kentucky Nuggets! The chicken tenders or whatever you have now just aren’t the same. But I digress.) I decided to buy this at Rueifong Night Market in Kaohsiung when I saw a long line of people queued up for it. Chinese friends always tell me that’s how you spot a great eatery — by the line going out the door and snaking around a corner. Personally, I’ve always suspected that a lot of that attraction to lines is just the collectivist streak in Chinese culture. But this time, the folks in line were right. Oh my goodness (21 April 2018).
Restaurants
There are two types of restaurants I like in Taiwan. I don’t care for the big banquet-hall wedding-reception type places where they overcharge you. What I like are, when I’m alone, (1) tiny hole-in-the-wall family-run places where you eat on folding tables sitting on plastic stools, and, when I’m with a group, (2) more casual restaurants where you sit at wide circular tables and order a variety of dishes, as well as a big 600ml bottle or three of the local swill (Taiwan Beer, in this case), which you pour for each other into tiny glasses. (Mom, you remember in Hong Kong when Anne took us out to “American Restaurant?” It’s like that.)
Here’s an example of the first category, the tiny family-run place, in Tainan. Kitchen in back, living room with the kids doing their homework or playing video games in the middle, and tables out front. And just five items on the menu — perfect. This is a delicious bowl of “cart noodles” (擔仔麵). In Taiwan, you order noodles either in soup (湯麵) or “dry” (乾麵), meaning with just a little broth. This is the former. The shrimp on top are a nice garnish, don’t you think? (13 April 2018)
This, from another small roadside eatery, was both my cheapest and most delicious meal (well, snack, really; I had some junk food and beer back in my hotel room I had to finish off later that night). The drink is soymilk (豆漿), lightly sweetened. It can be served warm or, on this toasty night, cold. On the right, two steamed buns (包子). On the outside, they’re light, sticky rice flour (22 April 2018).
Inside, there’s a delicious ball of greasy something. In this case, it’s a mystery meat (pork, I think). These were my favorite thing to buy at the night market when I was a student in Taipei 16 years ago. I remember another one I got from a street vendor in Guangzhou (Canton) in mainland China in 2009. Biting into it and tasting that delicious ball of meat and having the hot grease drip down your chin and onto your shorts… oh it’s the best. Steamed buns are my favorite food in China (22 April 2018).
And did I mention this was the cheapest meal I ate in Taiwan? Cost: $0. This nice lady insisted on serving it to me for free after we chatted in Chinese about her travels in the U.S. That’s what I call hospitality! (22 April 2018)
This is a small table at more of the second type of larger restaurant. It’s in the upscale Pier-2 building along Kaohsiung Harbor, so I expected it to be pricey, but it wasn’t bad. Just NT$230 ($7.83) for two appetizers, two mains, and, inevitably for me, a bubble tea (17 April 2018).
Breakfast
Now I’m not much of a breakfast person, not because I don’t like breakfast food. I just don’t like being ambulatory in the a.m. if I can help it. I was able to rouse myself early a couple of times for Chinese breakfast, however (don’t worry; I went back to bed and slept until 11am afterward).
You know my stomach(s) like buffets. I made myself a hearty breakfast from the buffet at my hotel in Tainan. On the right there is my favorite Chinese breakfast food: congee (粥). It’s rice porridge — basically a watery version of steamed sticky white rice. The traditional condiments are various bits of pickled vegetables, and steamed, salted peanuts (11 April 2018).
Buffets
Speaking of buffets (自助餐), there are plenty of them in Taiwan, and I availed myself of them often. The eat-’til-you’re-full (吃到飽) variety is unfortunately getting quite scarce, probably because of me and others with similar metabolism. Instead, you pay by weight. It’s a familiar setup: a variety of dishes under the lights, and you pile as much as you want into your bowl or box. There was a great buffet place near where I lived as a student in the suburbs of Taipei, and for a splurge I’d go there and gorge myself. The best part is, you just pick out whatever you want; you don’t have to know the names of anything. Even now, my Chinese vocabulary as far as the names of foods go is very limited, so I can appreciate this.
All of my favorites are in here: Spicy tofu (麻辣豆腐), tomato eggs (西紅柿炒蛋), bok choy (白菜), etc. Incidentally, I love the Chinese words for tomato, which clearly reference its non-Chinese origin: Southerners call it “Western red persimmon” (西紅柿). Northerners call it “barbarian eggplant” (番茄) (8 April 2018).
Box Lunch
Other vendors specialize in take-away box lunches (便當). I suffered some… gastrointestinal distress after limiting my diet to just one super-cheap (NT$40; then, about $1.15) box lunch a day during my starving student days in Taipei. But following my well-paid 14 years with Uncle Sam, I splurged on this NT$65 ($2.22) box lunch in Tainan, just to dirty up my teeth after a visit to the dentist.
Ah, I remember this. Mystery meats, a little bit of shredded carrots, some fried egg. I sat and ate this on a park bench. A little old lady walked in and let her dog off its leash, and it proceeded to take a huge dump in the middle of the grass. The nice little old lady never made so much as a motion to scoop her dog’s poop. After the dog trotted over and sniffed my lunch, she leashed it back up and rode off on a bicycle, the dog trotting alongside her (12 April 2018).
And of course a box lunch isn’t the only quick meal around — Taiwan has its share of fast food. McDonald’s, KFC, Pizza Hut… they’re all here too. My favorite (yet again, tied to fond memories from my Taipei student days) is a Japanese chain called MOS BURGER (I don’t mean to shout; it’s just the name is always written in capital letters for some reason).
This is MOS BURGER’s wagyu beef burger. The chain really does use high-quality ingredients. This is a legit burger right here. They occasionally go off the rails with burgers that are just piles of fried seafood on a bun (see the poster at the top right of this photo), but if you stick with beef, you can’t go wrong (23 April 2018).
Dessert
Really, I have only two complaints against Chinese food: (1) Too oily, and (2) no dessert. There’s still no remedy in sight for problem #1. But in Taiwan anyway, desserts have taken off; see my bubble tea blog post for more on the ice cream scene.
Beverages
Last, and possibly not least, there are some excellent liquid refreshments here. I’ve already discussed bubble tea and soymilk. Taiwan also excels at fruit-milk (almost invariably, powdered milk) drinks. My favorite, mango, was unfortunately out of season in April when I visited. (Who knew tropical fruits have “seasons?” Luckily for me, late April is mango season in Sri Lanka. More on that later.) But papaya (木瓜) was, and made an excellent substitute. I tried carrot-milk juice at one night market. Ooh. Healthy, perhaps, but not a combination I can recommend.
I enjoyed this overpriced (NT$150; $5.12) organic smoothie at a hip little cafe in Tainan. The straw here is made of glass, which I think is a first for me. A nod toward sustainability by avoiding disposable plastic straws, perhaps? I don’t know, but I approve (12 April 2018).
Like organic smoothies, craft beer is everywhere now, and nearly equally overpriced. This very fine and very potent brew cost me NT$180 ($6.13), roughly the price of four big 600 ml bottles of convenience store Taiwan Beer (17 April 2018).
Unfortunately, Taiwan doesn’t have much of a bar culture. If you want a bar- or pub-style drinking experience, and especially if you want a cocktail or a hit of decent hard liquor — Chinese firewater all tastes like nail polish remover — it’ll be at a touristy place. Usually, I flee from these establishments, but once in a blue moon, like, say I’m a solo traveler who’s 80% introverted but still needs that 20% extrovert side satisfied, I like to sidle up to a bar and chat up the bartender.
Look at that. Not a Chinese character in the place! No, this beachfront bar is not at all an authentic Taiwanese experience. But you know, sometimes you just want to talk to somebody, and this kid was a good listener. Even when I got a pretty good buzz on with my second drink and my Chinese coasted downhill. Tonal languages are particularly tough when you’re drunk, OK? (20 April 2018).