Google search Taipei and one of the best tourist attractions the search would yield is actually food! The Taiwanese capital street food scene comes packed with bustling night markets, mouth watering aromas, and zillion dishes that vary from typical Asian cuisine to downright weird and exotic. Your taste buds will be nothing short of satisfied down the streets of Taipei.
Shilin Night Market is the undisputed king of the street food scene in Taiwan. It is the biggest, the easiest to reach with public transport, and certainly the most diverse night market offering an incredible array of food items, not to mention carnival games and little knickknacks.
So what is on the menu?
Let us start light and go for cheese oyster as an appetizer. Strolling down the roads and alleyways of Shilin you are bound to come across a cheese oyster stall. There you will find rows of oyster in the original shell stalked in a very neat and organized way. To make the process of cooking them faster, the seller actually uses torch fire coming from what could indeed be a welding machine! Sounds strange? Indeed, but wait until you savor the oyster cheese and start testing the flavor of melting cheese mixing with oyster. This is one starter you really don’t want to miss out on.
Done with starter; are you ready for the big thing?
Each country in the world comes with its own cuisine and with that comes one or two signature dishes; exquisite, yummy and most of the time atypical. And Taiwanese cuisine signature dishes don’t fall short on this front. Block your nostrils and go for the aptly named Stinky Tofu. The vegetarian dish is yummy but it is stinky as hell. So here is a very important piece of advise to get around the pungent stench: hold your breath. If you smell stinky tofu, your taste buds will automatically realize the odor, while if you skip on smelling it, you will enjoy it more. Just a heads up: stinky tofu is stinky all the way; better have an air freshener handy when you go to the toilet the next day.
A less adventurous signature dish to savor while roaming Taipei street food lanes is oyster omelette. As the name might imply, it is an omelette with oyster. Simple and easy, no air freshener involved.
What about drinks sir? Would you like to have bubble tea or … bubble tea or you would prefer … bubble tea?
Let us be honest with ourselves, if you go to Taiwan and don’t taste their national bubble tea drink your visit is simply incomplete. Bubble tea is a tea at the end of the day but it has sago seeds in it; hence came the bubble part of the naming. It is sweet, refreshing, and comes with literally an endless list of flavors as well as variants. A good old traditional bubble tea maker would have a list, hanged somewhere in the shop, that indicates the various degrees of sweetness (depending on the amount of sugar you desire) and coldness (depending on the amount of ice you would like to have). My favorite is the good old classical bubble tea with milk, medium sugar, medium ice. But if you feel bold, go for the more exotic flavors like honey lemon, passion fruit or even matcha red bean!
Crème brûlée for dessert?
What? Do you think I am in Europe? We are in Taiwan my dear, and since it is dessert time, it is deep fried ice cream time. Yeah you heard me right, deep fried ice cream as in sweat frozen ice cream the seller is going to get from his fridge, unwrap it and throw it in boiling hot oil to be fried. And guess what it tastes so good with a crunchy crust from the outside and a freezing cold ice cream from the inside….yummy!
If deep fried ice cream is too much for your sensitive teeth, go for the more common but sweet skewer of sugar coated fruits as a dessert.
Snack time!
What? Are you still hungry! Well, going to the night market in Taiwan is more of an activity rather than just a process of getting over the feeling of hunger or getting full. And whilst in the capital, there is no better example than Shilin Night Market. The most famous among Taiwan’s night markets offers a great opportunity to sample some of the country’s best street food, enjoy carnival games and go shopping for whatever you could think of from shoes and clothes to accessories and knickknacks. So why not spend time shopping while munching on some snacks; perhaps a skewer of grilled squid or cuttle fish balls, a bucket of fried prawns or soft shells, or may be a skewer of grilled or fried whole squid!
Finding a night market in Taipei is easy, but finding vegetarian food or halal food in a Taiwanese night market is a serious challenge. First you have the language barrier. Indeed most of the food signs come in English as well as Chinese, some don’t, especially when the stall is selling something as common and known as dim sum or bao; problem is: what is inside the dim sum, or what is inside the bao? With the abundance of apps available for our smartphones, having some sort of a dictionary app is certainly a good idea.
Done ... resolved … next issue please.
Well … that would be oil. A considerable portion of the street food in Taiwan’s night markets is fried, and in some cases pork lard is used instead of vegetable based oil. Ask the question, it won’t hurt to ask. Indeed this sounds like a hurdle for the halal foodie, but don’t be deterred, Taiwanese are very tolerant people. After all said and done, not in many places in the world, one would find Muslim prayer rooms in the airport and the main train station!
Shilin Night Market is the undisputed king of the street food scene in Taiwan. It is the biggest, the easiest to reach with public transport, and certainly the most diverse night market offering an incredible array of food items, not to mention carnival games and little knickknacks.
So what is on the menu?
Let us start light and go for cheese oyster as an appetizer. Strolling down the roads and alleyways of Shilin you are bound to come across a cheese oyster stall. There you will find rows of oyster in the original shell stalked in a very neat and organized way. To make the process of cooking them faster, the seller actually uses torch fire coming from what could indeed be a welding machine! Sounds strange? Indeed, but wait until you savor the oyster cheese and start testing the flavor of melting cheese mixing with oyster. This is one starter you really don’t want to miss out on.
Done with starter; are you ready for the big thing?
Each country in the world comes with its own cuisine and with that comes one or two signature dishes; exquisite, yummy and most of the time atypical. And Taiwanese cuisine signature dishes don’t fall short on this front. Block your nostrils and go for the aptly named Stinky Tofu. The vegetarian dish is yummy but it is stinky as hell. So here is a very important piece of advise to get around the pungent stench: hold your breath. If you smell stinky tofu, your taste buds will automatically realize the odor, while if you skip on smelling it, you will enjoy it more. Just a heads up: stinky tofu is stinky all the way; better have an air freshener handy when you go to the toilet the next day.
A less adventurous signature dish to savor while roaming Taipei street food lanes is oyster omelette. As the name might imply, it is an omelette with oyster. Simple and easy, no air freshener involved.
What about drinks sir? Would you like to have bubble tea or … bubble tea or you would prefer … bubble tea?
Let us be honest with ourselves, if you go to Taiwan and don’t taste their national bubble tea drink your visit is simply incomplete. Bubble tea is a tea at the end of the day but it has sago seeds in it; hence came the bubble part of the naming. It is sweet, refreshing, and comes with literally an endless list of flavors as well as variants. A good old traditional bubble tea maker would have a list, hanged somewhere in the shop, that indicates the various degrees of sweetness (depending on the amount of sugar you desire) and coldness (depending on the amount of ice you would like to have). My favorite is the good old classical bubble tea with milk, medium sugar, medium ice. But if you feel bold, go for the more exotic flavors like honey lemon, passion fruit or even matcha red bean!
Crème brûlée for dessert?
What? Do you think I am in Europe? We are in Taiwan my dear, and since it is dessert time, it is deep fried ice cream time. Yeah you heard me right, deep fried ice cream as in sweat frozen ice cream the seller is going to get from his fridge, unwrap it and throw it in boiling hot oil to be fried. And guess what it tastes so good with a crunchy crust from the outside and a freezing cold ice cream from the inside….yummy!
If deep fried ice cream is too much for your sensitive teeth, go for the more common but sweet skewer of sugar coated fruits as a dessert.
Snack time!
What? Are you still hungry! Well, going to the night market in Taiwan is more of an activity rather than just a process of getting over the feeling of hunger or getting full. And whilst in the capital, there is no better example than Shilin Night Market. The most famous among Taiwan’s night markets offers a great opportunity to sample some of the country’s best street food, enjoy carnival games and go shopping for whatever you could think of from shoes and clothes to accessories and knickknacks. So why not spend time shopping while munching on some snacks; perhaps a skewer of grilled squid or cuttle fish balls, a bucket of fried prawns or soft shells, or may be a skewer of grilled or fried whole squid!
Finding a night market in Taipei is easy, but finding vegetarian food or halal food in a Taiwanese night market is a serious challenge. First you have the language barrier. Indeed most of the food signs come in English as well as Chinese, some don’t, especially when the stall is selling something as common and known as dim sum or bao; problem is: what is inside the dim sum, or what is inside the bao? With the abundance of apps available for our smartphones, having some sort of a dictionary app is certainly a good idea.
Done ... resolved … next issue please.
Well … that would be oil. A considerable portion of the street food in Taiwan’s night markets is fried, and in some cases pork lard is used instead of vegetable based oil. Ask the question, it won’t hurt to ask. Indeed this sounds like a hurdle for the halal foodie, but don’t be deterred, Taiwanese are very tolerant people. After all said and done, not in many places in the world, one would find Muslim prayer rooms in the airport and the main train station!
