Food in Taiwan
V: Food
links:
III: Puli, Guanziling, and Kaohsiung
(a) Food in Taiwan.
Most food we had in Taipei was generally good-tasting, well-prepared Chinese cuisine. This is my opinion and not necessarily endorsed by my travel companions, some of whom have excellent palates. But, in general, Chinese like to eat well and are very particular about the taste.
left: This eating place on the side of a covered street specializes in takeout and does not have more than a couple of chairs to the left of the picture. They prepare and sell congee, Chinese thin porridge made from a flavorful base. In the middle is a stack of the Chinese savory “donuts”.
If you run a restaurant, the food better be good, or nobody will come to patronize the place. And maybe because there is so much competition food is, surprisingly, not very expensive in Taiwan. On the street corners there are eating places everywhere, some with just a couple of tables and chairs for seating.
right: An airy, millefeuille pastry with sweet black-bean filling.
The picture on top serves hot food for dinner and lunch. One day we stopped in this place to have a snack lunch of soy milk deep-fried long savory “doughnuts”, almond buns, dumplings, black-bean paste crispy, millefeuille pastry, pie-sized slices of vegetables inside pan-fried dough, soft tofu with boiled peanuts in syrup as dessert, etc. The total bill for eight was less than $30.=
left: Panfried vegetable pie slice.
As for the better cuisine, it helped, of course, that a member of our group has been doing business with many Taiwanese enterprises over the last few decades, so he knew the country very well and we were often treated to great and expensive eating places. But many of these places serve non-native cuisines. You have good Japanese, Chinese, or even French restaurants. What about original Taiwanese food you wonder. Original Taiwanese food, as prepared by aboriginals, do not have the refined and developed taste of these more advanced cuisines.
Below is a random selection of some of the other places we visited for food.
(b): Shabu Shabu
right: Halfway the meal in the Shabu Shabu restaurant.
The Japanese style Shabu Shabu Restaurant is a nice eating venue, which you might find in almost any major metropolitan city in the world. The food was of excellent quality, tasteful and plenty.
Vegetables are boiled in a broth at your table and you can then also drop various thinly sliced meats, a great selection of fresh seafood and other delicacies to cook to personal doneness. An important addition is the sauce, which you prepare yourself by mixing from the contents of several pots to get the individual right taste.
In the picture above, three bowls of independently heated broth are visible. Heating is from a source below the table. On the table are thin slices of beef and lamb as well as a plate of varied seafood. And to the right is a bowl of vegetables.
(c): Din Tai Fung.
left; Entrance to Din Tai Fung Tienmu Restaurant. Looks like the entrance to a zoo.
The Din Tai Fung chain has a number of restaurants all over the world. In Taipei they have several venues. We visited their Tienmu branch, its official address is B1, No. 77, Sec 6, Zhongshan N Road, Taipei. They have been awarded one star by Michelin.
right: Din Tai Fung serves the world-famous xiaolongba; liquid filled dumplings, available in a large choice of fillings.
Although they have a varied and large menu, their specialty is still the xiaolongbaos. An order usually consists of ten one-bite, wonderfully tasting soup-filled dumplings.
left: If you walk around the restaurant, you see the hygienically garbed staff, making the little dumplings by hand, thousands of them.
This restaurant is located in the corner of a large department store floor, where you can drool at many displays of other tasty, mouth-watering treats like specialty cakes and chocolate truffles. In the picture shown, the restaurant is in the middle, way back.
The specialty of the chain is their xiaolongbao, small steamed buns or dumplings, which they make by the thousands in a large variety of flavors and colors. A congealed broth is stuffed inside before the dumpling is steamed and served piping hot. As you bite into the morsel, its tasty liquid contents bursts in our mouth, filling it with wonderful flavors. . Be sure to order the #1 dumplings on the menu, which has a juicy pork-flavored soup filling. You can also splurge and get their pork and truffle xiaolongbau, which is in a class apart.
right: Crab steamed in aluminum foil.
But they also serve a host of other good-tasting and well-prepared dishes. Some of these are shown in the pictures, such as local crab and the roast pork.
The place does not look like a venue which earned a one-star Michelin rating. There are lots of people just milling around busy with their smart-phones. At first sight it is rather reminiscent of a large cafeteria with seating on long, communal tables and benches. But once are seated, service is very good and they frequently change your plates during the meal.
left: The roast pork.
Waiting times are long; thirty minutes being about the minimum. But you can walk around and enjoy looking at other things offered on the same floor. But once you have tasted their food, you will agree that it was well worth the wait. And so will the other members of your party.
(d): Izakaya-nonbei
There is an Izakaya-nonbei restaurant in Honolulu, and I do not know whether that one is related to the one we visited in Taipei. But our guides took us here, when we asked for a good, medium priced Japanese restaurant. The Japanese ruled Taiwan for many years, so there is still their strong influence everywhere. I have the business card of the restaurant, but I do not know how to translate the address in Latin. They are on a small street parallel to and between Nanjing E Road and Zhang-an E. Road.
right: The Izakaya-nonbei restaurant in Taipei in the evening. Very Japanese looking.
They are located on a narrow commercial street, which looks very Japanese to us, garishly lighted with neon signs. The street had many restaurants, as well as massage parlors and a fair number of houses with a closed door with the name of a lady on it. You can just walk up and knock at the door, if you feel you would appreciate the company of that lady. Which may be a bit difficult for us, since they would probably only speak Chinese or Japanese. It is a real Japanese entertainment district.
The restaurant itself is a small place, up narrow steep stairs on the second floor, comprising of about 8 small, separate tatami style dining rooms, where you and your party can dine in a modicum of privacy. But somebody from the staff does pear into the room once every minutes to see whether we needed anything. As befitting a real Japanese restaurant, the staff only speaks Japanese and Chinese, languages in which we are rather lacking in conversational skills, because my Chinese is quite elementary, and my Japanese basically non-existent.
But our guide came along to help in ordering the dishes, and then she left us to our own devices. The food was OK, not exceptional. But it was an interesting experience.
(e): Dageeli Tribe Restaurant.
In Hualien, on the East Coast and close to the Taroko gorge, we were able to taste the local traditional aboriginal food. This restaurant, named Dageeli, was a few miles from the entrance to Taroko Gorge and is operated by members of the Truku tribe. Seating was outdoors. Even though their business card proclaims that theirs is a creative cuisine, the food was simply prepared, as can be seen from the picture shown below.
left: Although the restaurant had standard seating with tables and chairs, they also had these open-air pavilions, where you sit on benches and eat together from a long table. This was the end of our repast; there was still a lot of food left over.
In the picture below you see from left to right: (a) an asparagus-chicken in soy sauce; (b) slices of a nondescript sausage, maybe Kolb and bean sprouts. (c) On the large leaf-lined plate is the entree: sliced roast pork above and steamed chicken below. (d) To the right a dish of thinly sliced raw red cabbage. We were also served a large bowl of clear vegetable soup and a 2-3 lbs large steamed sea-bass. It was simple, wholesome food. Lunch for 8 was around US$60.
right: The meal by Taiwanese aboriginals were wholesome, but not very refined in taste.
(f) The Ba-jia Leisure Fish Farm
This fish farm is located outside Taipei in Shangde Village in Yilan county. In this fish farm they breed a variety of fresh-water fish in a series of large aerated ponds; they claim an annual production of as high as 100 tons. The water to the ponds comes from clean mountains streams and the fish are fed with commercially prepared food pellets. You see these huge cardboard containers on the artificial islands in the middle of the ponds, where the aerator is also located, churning huge amounts of air into the water. The water from the ponds then go to a large decorative lagoon and finally from there to waste disposal. The Ba-jia Leisure Fish Farm is one of the largest in the area, and they also have an adjacent restaurant, where you can taste the freshly caught fish from the ponds. The waste from the toilets of the restaurant are released at the far end of the lagoon, just before where the lagoon water goes to wherever waste water goes.
We stopped there for a fish dinner and the main dish was a 2-3 lbs steamed fish in a delicate soy sauce. We also ordered the other specialty of the restaurant, one huge but very tasty barbecued pig’s foot.
(g) The Hunghwa (Red Flower) Teppanyaki Steak House
This is an upscale restaurant on the 5th floor in the Taipei 101 Tower-Mall, which is 500 meter high in Taipei 101 building, one of the tallest buildings in the world. In this Teppanyaki house, the quality of ingredients, service, and price are all well above average. This is where you want to go, if there is a well-off someone who wants to take you to dinner.
The food is what you can expect in any Teppanyaki restaurant, with a chef preparing the dishes over the flat hot surface in front of you. They claim they use the best and freshest ingredients they can get. And as befitting a top-notch restaurant, the wine list is also impressive, as well as the bill, I presume. But it will still be substantially less than what you would have to pay in a 2 or 3 Michelin-starred restaurant in Paris.
left: Nicely presented dessert of fruits in jam.
6:50 AM
