Gastronomic Homecoming in Taipei, Part 1

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Taiwan is no one's first choice for traveling to Asia. Most people conjure images of the "Made in Taiwan" stamp on electronics and toys, rather than striking mountain scenery and temples surrounded by wild jungle. The lack of famous sights and tourist infrastructure makes Taiwan difficult for first-timers to Asia compared to Thailand, and as a thoroughly modern city, Taipei is less exciting than nearby Tokyo.

However, Taipei is full of treasures for those who know what's truly important in life. That's right...I'm talking about food.

I was born in Taipei, and returned frequently as a youngster until school and life started getting in the way. My last visit was the summer before I left for college, while my brother studied there in a language/culture program infamously known as "Love Boat." My parents continued yearly visits, except for during the unfortunate SARS outbreak.

In 2006 my father turned 60, an important age to the Chinese: it meant he had completed 5 cycles of the zodiac. In celebration, and coinciding with a speaking engagement at a medical conference, he treated me and my brother to a homecoming trip. Four days were spent touring the east coast of the island. The other six days were spent indulging in the best foods Taipei has to offer.

From the simplest street snack to the typical 12-course banquet, Taiwanese food astounds at every turn. Taiwan's mixed population of long-time natives and more recent Chinese immigrants has blessed the cuisine with a combination of local delicacies and the best from all mainland provinces. Emphasis is given to quality and freshness of ingredients, not to mention cleanliness.

Spend some time with locals and the talk turns invariably to food. My father would strike up conversations with taxi drivers about his favorite dishes, and rather than considering him crazy, they would reciprocate his excitement. Every stranger had an opinion about where to eat what. During elegant dinners organized by the medical convention, a typical topic would be other memorable meals.

Because food is the main draw, Taipei is best experienced living there. As much as I love it and feel my roots there, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone looking for seriously exotic Asian travel. But for those who may find themselves in Taipei for other reasons will be thrilled with the variety of mouthwatering foods available.

Part 1 features street food, part 2 features restaurants/lodging.

Quick Tips:

Do as much research as possible before heading to Taipei, including whatever directions you can find online. Study maps. Taipei receives few Western tourists, so there isn't a "gringo trail," so to speak. While the Metro features English signage, many streets and underground walkways do not.

The National Palace Museum is a must-see for fans of Chinese art & antiquities. The best of Chinese art was carried over to Taipei for safekeeping while the KMT battled the Communists. When the KMT eventually fled the country, thousands of paintings, calligraphic scrolls, ceramics and jade works were retained. Check the schedule at the ticket office for free English tours, or simply lose time wandering.

Other non-food-related sites of interest around town are the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial (watch the EXCRUCIATINGLY slow changing of the guard!) and Taipei 101 (the highest building in the world—for now). For those who need a breather from the big city, Yangmingshan is a beautiful mountain park just outside Taipei, and former gold-mining town Jinguashi makes for a pleasant daytrip.

The major dialect in Taiwan is Mandarin. For short trips it's quite unnecessary to learn Taiwanese, but a few words of Mandarin would be appreciated!

Taipei is very safe for a large city. Traffic is a much bigger concern than crime, although things have greatly improved. My mom was proud to note that "now, drivers stop at the red lights and people rarely walk into the street unexpectedly anymore." It's the great leap forward.

Best Way To Get Around:

There is a movement afoot to make Taipei more "English friendly." Until that happens, transportation may be a bit of an adventure.

Taxis are quite cheap, although taxi drivers are unlikely to speak English. Hotels should provide written directions in Chinese to present to the drivers. In my experience, the drivers are usually quite friendly and cabs are clean. Tipping is not mandatory.

Buses are simple for Chinese speakers, and perfectly comfortable—just like any bus in the US or Europe. They are incredibly cheap, about 50 cents per ride, but destination information is posted in Chinese only and drivers do not speak English.

The best chance to experience public transportation for non-Chinese speakers is the Metro. Signs are clearly printed in English in this bright, well-maintained system. Fares depend on distance, but unlimited-ride tickets are also available.

Ah, the Taiwanese love a good deep-fried breakfast. You tiao, fried dough sticks about 18 inches in length, are a comfort food from my childhood. As a kid we'd be served you tiao with a shallow bowl of sugar for dipping and a cold glass of soy milk—great way to start any day!

The grown-up version? Salty instead of sweet, but just as deliciously sinful. Sao bing you tiao is a sandwich of a crispy sesame flatbread stuffed with chopped you tiao—every bite squishes with oil (but in an unbelievably tasty way, I swear!). A fantastic place for sao bing you tiao is Shing Shen Dou Jiang Dian, an open-air stand at #70 Ai-Kuo East Road. This road is known as "the wedding street," a place most cabbies can locate. On the southwest corner of the Chiang Kai Shek memorial, Shing Shen is only about two blocks from my grandfather's apartment, thus very convenient whenever the craving hit.

Everything is made for take-away eating, but there is seating available at a tiny counter and tables. A couple of weathered-looking old men take turns rolling out the you tiao, cutting grooves in them to create their unique look, and dipping batches in the fryer—a slow, patient process. The finished result wrapped in the sao bing is unbelievably decadent but light at the same time.

As accompaniment most people order dou jiang, soybean milk. It's available cold and sweet in a cup or hot and salty in a soup bowl. Either version is excellent. Other breakfast items are available as well, like dan bing, eggs rolled up in Chinese pancakes. But the fried dough and soy milk are the big draws—the small stand gets packed quickly!

One sao bing you tiao costs 24NT and a cup of dou jiang costs 20NT. Do not miss this local specialty while in Taipei.

Near my grandfather's apartment is a 100-year-old market my mother has frequented since childhood. Nanmen (south gate) market, once a simple bamboo construction, was renovated in the late 70s and is stuffed full of local delicacies.

The most attractive snacks are on the ground floor. These include dried foods of all kinds, from exotic fruits to sea creatures—salty dried octopus is a Taiwanese favorite, and my dad was sure to snap some up. (Available in Chinese markets in the States as well, but we don't let any opportunities pass us by). The first floor also featured a variety of mouth-watering sausages, beautiful fresh fruits and display after display of man tou, a pillowy soft white Chinese roll—slightly sweet and great with Peking duck, or deep-fried and served with condensed milk. These lovely renditions came in different colors/flavors like taro root, a lovely purple shade.

My absolute bar-none favorite treat is one that I despair I'll ever see replicated in the States: pork jerky studded with black sesame and coated in honey. The flavor is incredible. The thick version (about 2 millimeters) is pleasantly chewy. But the amazing thin version was almost transparent, as light as potato chips, with just as much intense taste. I've never seen jerky like this in the Asian neighborhoods of New York—usually what I see is very dark and lumpy, sometimes partly shredded, sometimes a bit wet. This was dry and smooth, a light red, and so beautiful with the black seeds. I managed to sneak some of the thick style back into the States past customs but it didn't last me very long. The thin translucent style was polished off on the first day of our road trip.

Elsewhere in the market, customers can buy prepared foods to take home as well as components like fish cakes (unbelievable variety) or freshly-killed chickens. In the basement, a small boy clutching a sack from Shing Shen Dou Jiang Dian watched his mother plucking the birds with wide eyes.

As much as I loved the market, it was still just a very good market...so I was incredibly surprised to see a Japanese tour group there the last time we went. Not sure what the tourism appeal is, but Asian tourists certainly set a premium on getting a good meal no matter what other attractions are available.

There are far too many street stalls and portable snacks in Taipei to list, many located outside the sprawling night markets. Here is a sampling of some of the more unusual.

Eggs of all kinds
My people love eggs! Useful for so many things. Eggs are far from just breakfast food in Chinese cooking; scrambled eggs with scallions or tomatoes is a common dinner dish, egg drops appear in a variety of soups from minced beef to hot and sour, and thousand-year-old eggs are one of the cuisine's most famous oddities.

Most unusual food preparation methods stem from necessity. These are no exception: Chinese people needed a way to increase the shelf life of eggs in the days before refrigeration, and came up with a few ingenious ideas.

TEA EGGS. These are simply hard-boiled eggs simmered in black tea for an hour or so. The shells are cracked lightly before immersing in tea, resulting in a beautiful marbled effect on the whites. Easy and common to make at home.

IRON EGGS. These are a Taiwanese specialty, made by repeating cycles of boiling in soy sauce and drying until the whites turn black and achieve a leathery texture. They aren't as hard as the name implies, however, more a pleasant "al dente" feel with a fantastic infused flavor. These are an absolute must-try off the streets of Taipei.

THOUSAND-YEAR-OLD EGGS. These are generally made from duck eggs, but I believe quail eggs can also be used. Eggs are coated in a clay-like mixture of tea, ashes and salt, buried and cured for 100 days. (That beats refrigeration records!) The whites turn gelatinous and the yolks turn green...they doesn't look appetizing but really are quite tasty. They are available off the street for snacking but are best sliced into congee.

Ice Monster
Every Asian island nation must eventually arrive at the idea of creating a dessert from shaved ice. I'll include Hawaii in this assessment. Tropical heat and a people that tends toward lactose intolerance makes shaved ice preferable to ice cream. My parents had dreamed of chi bing (eating ice) since arrival.

In Taiwan, the most traditional combination is ice with sweet red beans and condensed milk. Other options are taro (a root vegetable that is often sweetened for Chinese pastries) or fruit. The new chain Ice Monster expands on these options by adding ice cream for those young folks that grew up on dairy. As expected, my dad beelined for the red-bean variety, while my mom scarfed down a dish covered in mango cubes and mango ice cream. Portions are extremely generous, and very refreshing. Traditional combo is the cheapest at 60NT (less than $2), but all prices are very reasonable.

Ice Monster recently opened a branch in Tokyo to enormous success, which may account for the large number of Japanese tourists we saw at the Yongkang street outpost.

Candy Apples
Ximending is the young and trendy shopping district, with its own cutesy mascot (an alien-like creature with the "xi men"—west gate—on its head), and a cutesy snack to match! I'm not really sure these candy apples originated in this area but I saw two candy-apple shops there and nowhere else. These unique candy apples are covered in all sorts of random sweets, like gummy bears, marshmallows or mini-Oreos. I even saw mini-Ritz's, which didn't sound like a great combination. We split a "turtle" apple, which was chocolate and caramel dipped in peanuts...absolutely scrumptious. At only a couple dollars, I kind of wished I had room to try another.

Pepper buns
These delicious mounds are something I've definitely never seen in the States. Hu-jiao bing originated in Fuzhou province, from where many Taiwan citizens emigrated. The buns are baked inside a furnace-like drum, where the soft dough sticks to the side and forms a crust. The crispy shells encase savory ground pork & green onions with lots of black pepper. Great flavor

We always had dinner plans during our limited time in Taipei, so it was hard to eat in the night markets as much as I would like. My mom and I planned a full meal around Keelung, my brother and I took several for the team by picking up snacks in Guangzhou after we'd already had dinner, but when we visited Shilin we were too full to do anything but shop. We stopped by Snake Alley, also known as the Huaxi Tourist Night Market. If that "tourist" moniker doesn't explain everything, let me say the only reason to go there is to watch snakes be cruelly skinned alive as part of some gruesome pseudo medicine show.

A night market is—perhaps obviously—a market that only appears at night. In general, the ones in Taipei occur daily, on major thoroughfares and alleys that operate normally during the day. Markets sell all sorts of goods—occasionally genuine—from clothing to DVDs to pets. Taiwan is not a developing country, but those facing sticker shock coming from other parts of Asia can rest assured that while the department store prices are on par with the States, the night markets still offer plenty of good bargains. I'm still getting good use out of the two pairs of stylish heels I picked up for $8 each in Shilin.

The best thing about the night markets are the xiaochi, or small eats, on offer. Some of these dishes are common, like oyster pancakes, but sometimes a market develops a new famous dish not seen elsewhere, like the "fried sandwich" we tried in Keelung.

In Guangzhou Market near the famous Longshan Temple, we tried sweet steamed rice cakes stuffed with peanut or black sesame, cakes made from an eggy batter encasing custard, and Japanese octopus balls, known as takoyaki. Of course we've had takoyaki before, but in New York they are literally $1 per ball. In Guangzhou market, it's about $1.50 for 8. Delicious and perfectly crispy. The eggy cakes are one my dad's favorite street snacks, but my brother and I were less impressed. The rice cakes were good but not quite what we were craving, namely mogi, glutinous rice balls with fillings. (Mogi are not sold on the street). This market featured a whole kids' arcade section, and was extremely crowded.

Keelung is a 30-minute bus or train ride out of Taipei. Once there, ask around for the miao kou, the "Temple Mouth." There is actually a functional temple but it's practically buried under all the market stalls. Food stands line the open space between the gate and the door while vendors sell clothing and other trinkets on surrounding streets. Keelung is sprawling and very popular.

The main food stalls have recently been renovated, with signs printed clearly in both English and Chinese. It's extremely unlikely to find a vendor that speaks English, but at least non-Chinese will be able to guess what they're getting! My mom and I started with the oyster pancakes, a very typical Taiwanese xiaochi. The pancake is made with sweet potato starch and egg, which turns into a glutinous mass suorrounding very lightly cooked oysters. Messy but delicious, for about 50NT. We grabbed a sack of grilled Chinese sausage (more sweet than savory), getting 4 with extra garlic for 20NT. A freshly-made papaya milkshake cost only 40NT, and a yummy portion of fried fishcakes was 30NT. The "fried sandwich" my cousin had so heartily recommended was basically a hero roll deep-fried, with cold cuts, veggies and an overabundance of Miracle Whip stuffed in. It was most mystifying, both in execution and popularity, with the clamoring crowd taking tickets for a place in line.

Taipei these days is modern, glitzy, and pricey. Night markets are a great way to see the real Taipei, a city that lives on the streets, stays up late, looks for a good bargain and places a premium on excellent food.