Taiwan food post: breakfasts
Now that i am back in Taipei it's time to put together a food post. I am going to try split it out to several posts so they are more digestible, ho ho. Since it's morning right now and i just had a breakfast, let's start with a breakfast post.
A common theme of these breakfast photos is that they are almost all taken inside my hotel room with the typical lack of natural lighting that you get in a country where windows in hotel rooms are an optional extra. Although there are plenty of breakfast places where you can eat out, they tend to have a very limited menu featuring 蛋餅 egg pancake, toast (which i remember as being spelled 多士 in Guangdong, but in Taiwan it's some other phonetic approximation of the English word ending in 司) and burger. Yes, burgers are a breakfast food in Taiwan. These all taste pretty much exactly the same as American diner food, so they are not very interesting for anyone who lived in Canada or the US. Most other breakfast stuff in Taiwan you get to go.
I don't know where people eat their to go breakfasts, because only occasionally i see people eating breakfast in the office at work, and going back to your apartment feels like a waste since you already put all your clothes on to go outside. When i am not on holiday i prep my own breakfast - usually just a bowl of fruit and oats - and enjoy it in my underwear. But on the road it's a whole production. Well, minus the professional lighting and camerawork that there would be if it was a literal production. Enjoy the blurry shots. That's why there's words under them.
My first breakfast was a result of a fortuitous location - the hotel i ended up at after my wet ride through the Taoyuan paddies was right next to a market. I've said it before, but i'll say it again - wet markets (often called "early markets" or "morning markets" in Taiwan) are by far the best place to experience local food culture. They feel much more down-to-Earth to me than night markets, which are primarily aimed at tourists both local and foreign. Instead of franchised food carts selling the same boring deep-fried food you can get anywhere, there are vendors who came in from the fishing boat or the farm selling wares that they caught or harvested that very morning. Almost all the customers are local people buying ingredients to cook for their family. And the prepared food does not include gimmicky snacks that play well on YouTube or TikTok, they're just the same, simple prepared foods that people have been eating for decades, or in some cases centuries.
So, first day i got a freshly cut pineapple and a sesame-sprinkled pastry with 黑糖 "black sugar" inside. 黑糖 is used to describe a locally-produced dark brown sugar something like muscovado. It's a common pastry-filler here, although usually it's just a subtle swirl of sweetness. This one had a small, biteable chunk of black sugar, almost like panela or jaggery! It was a nice surprise, although admittedly a bit sweeter than what i usually like to eat.
Day two breakfast is an example of the classic Taiwanese hotel breakfast. Most hotels i stayed at didn't offer breakfast, but the ones that did all had the typical setup. There is always a pot of 粥 congee and a pot of 白飯 white rice. In Taiwan - unlike China - there is always a real coffee machine that grinds the beans and makes you a great cup of espresso. Tea, of course. Fruit juice. Toast. Eggs. Various limp-looking veg, meat and fish dishes sitting in buffet pans. If you are very lucky there is fresh fruit. This time i just got rice, a fried egg, cabbage, 空心菜 water spinach and some pineapple. It was fine.
Day three i sat down in a diner because i saw a sign offering 川味涼麵 Sichuan-style cold noodle. I should know better by now. Sichuan food, and more generally any kind of Chinese food that isn't from Fujian province, fucking sucks in Taiwan. It's trash. There is some myth that Taiwan has the best Chinese food in the world because all the great chefs left the mainland and came to Taiwan when the Communists took over, but it's lies. Chinese food is much, much better in China.
Case in point. This cold noodle. Typical Taiwanese convenience store style garbage, where the noodles are actually cold, like they came out of a refrigerator. In China cold noodle starts out as freshly-made hot noodle and then they dunk it in cold water before mixing the dish. They don't use this squirt bottle of baby-poop sauce, they mix goddamn fucking chili oil through it, and sesame oil, and black vinegar, and fresh cut cilantro. Plus you get peanuts on top, or soy nuts, or something else crispy and crunchy to ensure a delightful texture. Also, the vegetables are not cold and damp and grated, they're cut julienne and left at room temperature, which when you are in a Chengdu summer means they're 30+ degrees. I mean, literally, it's not fucking 冷麵 (cold noodle) it's 涼麵 (cool noodle). 冷麵 is a Korean dish, not Chinese, but in Taiwan they've blended into all the same genre of soggy wheat sticks and i am sure that the local Korean version sucks just as bad as the Sichuan one. God this made me angry to eat. Chili powder? Are you fucking kidding me? It was offensively bad. My favorite food from China, desecrated!
Just as i was raging out of the noodle place, i had whiplash when i saw my favorite Taiwanese breakfast of all time sitting there waiting for me in a food cart just opposite my hotel. Goddamnit. It was a 飯糰 rice ball. These things are mythical. It's supposedly a classic Taiwanese breakfast, but i almost never find one that's open because they start really early in the morning and sell out before i am usually up. Of course you can also buy them 24/7 from convenience stores and shopping mall chain restaurants, but fuck those places. If you aren't buying from a local vendor, why even bother eating out at all? Anyway, this vendor was still going. The setup is, actually, a lot like the cold noodle setups in China. The vendor has two cauldrons - one with purple rice and one with white rice. You pick your rice, they splat it on a square of cling film/plastic wrap. They also have a mise en place of various stuff which you can choose what you want in there. There's always a vegan version, an ovo-vegetarian version, and several meat versions. Depending on the place you can pick from egg, tofu, meat, 油條 youtiao/fried dough, peanuts, pickles, meat/vege floss etc. It all gets heaped on the rice, then they roll it into a ball, put it in a plastic bag, and that's your breakfast. A good 飯糰 is about the size of a grapefruit, packed with flavor and reasonably easy to eat on the go. This one was great.
A less great breakfast was this bánh mì. Bánh mì is kind of like the "fuck it, i give up" snack for Europeans in south-east Asia. When you walk around and you can't find anything you want for breakfast, because a part of you is craving something western. The diner food isn't going to do it because that's more American than European. And anyway, there's no coffee. So you progressively get sadder and hungrier until you find the bánh mì guy, and you think, okay, yeah, a stick of French bread with some meat and veges inside? It's no brötchen, but it'll do. I probably wouldn't have bothered if they only had meat ones (which is the usual situation in Taiwan, China and Laos) but this one offered to do a vege one with some kind of mock duck or other fake meat. It was fine, as bánh mì always is. It's like a slightly less boring version of Subway, but it'll never really blow your head off with flavor. Even less so when they don't put any fresh-cut chili inside (Taiwan, le sigh). Still, i also picked up an icy passion fruit juice and some pineapple, and to be honest that shit the bomb. Eat Taiwanese pineapple, aka 自由鳳梨 "freedom pineapple" - good way to stick it to China who tried to punish us with sanctions and also improve any breakfast.
The bao situation in Taiwan is suboptimal. I mean, compared to the bao situation outside of Asia, it's great. But historically Taiwan is not in the bao belt. The local crop is rice, not wheat. Eventually they started importing wheat and making 包子 steam buns like all the rest of east Asia, but not all the popular flavors made it over the strait. In China i often got baos for breakfast, and there were a bunch of great sweet flavors like 芝麻 black sesame paste, 花生 peanut and white sugar, 紅豆饅頭 red bean mantou (better than 豆沙包 bean paste bun, which was often too sweet), 香芋 fragrant taro and 流沙 "quicksand" (custard) for those non-vegan days. Plus savory flavors like 麻辣豆腐 hot and numbing (mapo) tofu, 香菇青菜 mushroom and greens, 酸菜粉絲 pickle/cabbage and vermicelli noodle. And the king of all bun - 叉燒包 (char siu) pork bun.
Oh man, i got sidetracked reminiscing on the best buns. The thing in Taiwan is that they do have a reasonable selection of savory bun, but those are normally 水煎包 (aka 生煎包 in Guangdong) which is some kind of steam bun that subsequently got fried, i think? I don't know exactly how they cook it, but it's not in a bamboo steam basket. The buns are oily and wet rather than fluffy and dry. They are still delicious, but i find them a bit too heavy for breakfast. When it comes to actual steam buns in Taiwan, you usually only get the choice 菜包 vege bun or 肉包 meat bun. So, for this breakfast i got a vege bun. And then i got a 糖餅 sugar pastry on the side. This was similar to the black sugar pastry from the other day, but just with that slight smear of sweetness, no big ol' chunk o' jaggery. The 包 bao was fine. The 餅 bing was great.
Fast forward to another hotel breakfast. 涼麵 cold noodle is considered a breakfast dish in Taiwan, and this hotel offered something unique - a build-your-own cold noodle buffet. I figured this was my chance to make one how it's supposed to taste - with chili oil, vinegar and peanuts. It was much better than the one i got from the store, but still not great. Still, there was freedom pineapple to perk things up, plus something that Taiwan does much better than China - 豆花 bean flower aka tofu pudding. Also build-your-own! You could pick red bean or other toppings, but i just put simple syrup. Classic flavor.
This market haul was one of my best. It was from a morning market in Tainan. I got some delicious fresh papaya and pineapple, plus some 葱油餅 spring onion pancake. In the back you can see some dried/preserved sweet potato, which is a great snack i discovered in China. The local version was much sweeter than the one i used to get from the fruit shop near my house in Shenzhen, but that turned out to be worthwhile, because this was the day i cycled out to 草山月世界 Caoshan Moon World and got caught in the epic storm. I didn't get lunch, so the very sweet sweet potato i took with me gave me some energy boosts until i got more fruit and candy from the various kind strangers i met along the way.
You want a sad hotel breakfast? Here's one from the dive motel with in-room condom dispensers that i stayed my first night in Kaohsiung. Nothing on the buffet looked very appetizing, so i just made a bowl of white rice with pork (?) floss and some kind of local version of umeboshi. Scrambled eggs and cabbage on the side. Garnished with ketchup, because at this point who gives a fuck? I didn't need much because in my room i still had a mango and dragonfruit from the day before, and i happily chomped on those with a take-out cup of the fantastic espresso coffee.
Toward the end of my journey, i did end up going to a Taiwanese diner. I grabbed a 火腿蛋餅 egg pancake with ham and a 紅茶 sweet (red) tea. Little orange blobs are the sweet and sour sauce i added. It tasted... exactly like what you would expect it to taste like. Very bland. Very light. I was still hungry after. I found a place up the road that offered some more of those pastries with a dot of sugar inside, which was a more satisfying breakfast and what i ended up getting the next morning too. There was also a terrific coffee shop nearby, where i sipped on an americano while waiting for my laundry. Not really anything photogenic about these coffee shops, but man oh man. Coffee in Taiwan is really great.
My last market haul was from a wet market in Kaohsiung that i cycled through during the 228 holiday when i did a lightning trip to the south. This time i got a hotel close to the market specifically so i could get breakfast there, and it did not disappoint. The picture above is the famous 蚵仔煎 oyster omelette. This is one of the classic dishes of Taiwan and something every tourist is encouraged to try. I never had it before because i don't like seafood and i don't particularly like eggs either, but this seemed like a decent spot. The market was the kind that has meat hanging on hooks and offal flying all over the place, so i figured it wasn't going to get much fresher unless i was standing on the pier. It was... fine. Seafood, as usual, tastes like nothing to me, so it feels like a pointlessly cruel and laborious way to add salt to a dish. The omelette tasted like an omelette, with greens and beansprouts inside to give it the kind of crunch that in the west you would get from putting toast underneath. The sauce on top is an inoffensive sweet and sour thang, to which i added chili oil and chili sauce to give it a bit more kick.
It reminded me of a special dish from Melbourne Chinatown called egg chiffon. Egg chiffon is one of those "if you were there, then you know" dishes that only existed at two dive restaurants - A1 and King of Kings. For under $10 you got a mound of white rice, with a runny multiple-egg omelette on top, that had your choice of 叉燒 char siu BBQ meat cooked through it. It came with a gravy boat filled with some kind of magical MSG sauce that tasted absolutely incredible. Both those restaurants have since shut down and now you can apparently only get it at a place called Rose Garden BBQ where it is called 包蛋, which i will translate as "egg bag". Anyway, this kind of runny omelette with meat inside, and a special sauce on top, i've searched for it everywhere since leaving Melbourne and it just doesn't exist. (American 芙蓉蛋 egg foo young is much too dry.) But turns out this 蚵仔煎 is pretty close. If only they served it on rice and put char siu in it instead of oysters. Can't have everything...
Anyway, i can understand why this dish is popular. It's reasonably filling and pleasant enough. As usual with pretty much everything coming out of Taiwan slash Fujian province, it's not going to knock your socks off with flavor unless you seriously sauce it up. Bland is the name of the game in Hokkien cookery. Slightly less bland than Cantonese cookery, i suppose, but also it's less dainty and attractive. I'll get more into ugly but alright-tasting foods in future posts.
After the 蚵仔煎 i picked up a few more goodies to take back to my hotel room. The thing that looks like a pork belly is actually some kind of glutinous rice sweet that reminded me of the stuff i found in the wet markets in Laos. The other purple rice blob is also sticky rice, soft and squishy and with a marshmallow-y taste and texture. It was great. Plus... 芋頭包 taro bun! In Taiwan they look at you weird if you say 香芋 (fragrant taro) because it's a Chinese term that is not used here, but this 芋頭 was exactly the comforting flavor i remember from my favorite bun shops in Shenzhen. Really great feed for my last brekky on the road.
So that's the first round food post. I am starting to ponder why so much of how i experience a place is through the food. Maybe it's because i don't really go to visit museums or other tourist sites any more. I spend most of my holidays walking or biking - enjoying the physical process of getting from point A to point B - so the only times i pause are the times i eat. And wandering through wet markets, up and down back alleys, searching for the vendor who will have the perfect dish for me, it's always memorable. Looking at pictures of the food i ate can bring back as much about the place as a picture of the scenery. And purposefully enjoying the food encourages me to think more about the sociology and the history that brought this sustenance from the fields to my lips. Man, food is great. I love it so much, even when i hate it. I hope y'all do too, because there are probably a couple more of these to come.
A common theme of these breakfast photos is that they are almost all taken inside my hotel room with the typical lack of natural lighting that you get in a country where windows in hotel rooms are an optional extra. Although there are plenty of breakfast places where you can eat out, they tend to have a very limited menu featuring 蛋餅 egg pancake, toast (which i remember as being spelled 多士 in Guangdong, but in Taiwan it's some other phonetic approximation of the English word ending in 司) and burger. Yes, burgers are a breakfast food in Taiwan. These all taste pretty much exactly the same as American diner food, so they are not very interesting for anyone who lived in Canada or the US. Most other breakfast stuff in Taiwan you get to go.
I don't know where people eat their to go breakfasts, because only occasionally i see people eating breakfast in the office at work, and going back to your apartment feels like a waste since you already put all your clothes on to go outside. When i am not on holiday i prep my own breakfast - usually just a bowl of fruit and oats - and enjoy it in my underwear. But on the road it's a whole production. Well, minus the professional lighting and camerawork that there would be if it was a literal production. Enjoy the blurry shots. That's why there's words under them.
My first breakfast was a result of a fortuitous location - the hotel i ended up at after my wet ride through the Taoyuan paddies was right next to a market. I've said it before, but i'll say it again - wet markets (often called "early markets" or "morning markets" in Taiwan) are by far the best place to experience local food culture. They feel much more down-to-Earth to me than night markets, which are primarily aimed at tourists both local and foreign. Instead of franchised food carts selling the same boring deep-fried food you can get anywhere, there are vendors who came in from the fishing boat or the farm selling wares that they caught or harvested that very morning. Almost all the customers are local people buying ingredients to cook for their family. And the prepared food does not include gimmicky snacks that play well on YouTube or TikTok, they're just the same, simple prepared foods that people have been eating for decades, or in some cases centuries.
So, first day i got a freshly cut pineapple and a sesame-sprinkled pastry with 黑糖 "black sugar" inside. 黑糖 is used to describe a locally-produced dark brown sugar something like muscovado. It's a common pastry-filler here, although usually it's just a subtle swirl of sweetness. This one had a small, biteable chunk of black sugar, almost like panela or jaggery! It was a nice surprise, although admittedly a bit sweeter than what i usually like to eat.
Day two breakfast is an example of the classic Taiwanese hotel breakfast. Most hotels i stayed at didn't offer breakfast, but the ones that did all had the typical setup. There is always a pot of 粥 congee and a pot of 白飯 white rice. In Taiwan - unlike China - there is always a real coffee machine that grinds the beans and makes you a great cup of espresso. Tea, of course. Fruit juice. Toast. Eggs. Various limp-looking veg, meat and fish dishes sitting in buffet pans. If you are very lucky there is fresh fruit. This time i just got rice, a fried egg, cabbage, 空心菜 water spinach and some pineapple. It was fine.
Day three i sat down in a diner because i saw a sign offering 川味涼麵 Sichuan-style cold noodle. I should know better by now. Sichuan food, and more generally any kind of Chinese food that isn't from Fujian province, fucking sucks in Taiwan. It's trash. There is some myth that Taiwan has the best Chinese food in the world because all the great chefs left the mainland and came to Taiwan when the Communists took over, but it's lies. Chinese food is much, much better in China.
Case in point. This cold noodle. Typical Taiwanese convenience store style garbage, where the noodles are actually cold, like they came out of a refrigerator. In China cold noodle starts out as freshly-made hot noodle and then they dunk it in cold water before mixing the dish. They don't use this squirt bottle of baby-poop sauce, they mix goddamn fucking chili oil through it, and sesame oil, and black vinegar, and fresh cut cilantro. Plus you get peanuts on top, or soy nuts, or something else crispy and crunchy to ensure a delightful texture. Also, the vegetables are not cold and damp and grated, they're cut julienne and left at room temperature, which when you are in a Chengdu summer means they're 30+ degrees. I mean, literally, it's not fucking 冷麵 (cold noodle) it's 涼麵 (cool noodle). 冷麵 is a Korean dish, not Chinese, but in Taiwan they've blended into all the same genre of soggy wheat sticks and i am sure that the local Korean version sucks just as bad as the Sichuan one. God this made me angry to eat. Chili powder? Are you fucking kidding me? It was offensively bad. My favorite food from China, desecrated!
Just as i was raging out of the noodle place, i had whiplash when i saw my favorite Taiwanese breakfast of all time sitting there waiting for me in a food cart just opposite my hotel. Goddamnit. It was a 飯糰 rice ball. These things are mythical. It's supposedly a classic Taiwanese breakfast, but i almost never find one that's open because they start really early in the morning and sell out before i am usually up. Of course you can also buy them 24/7 from convenience stores and shopping mall chain restaurants, but fuck those places. If you aren't buying from a local vendor, why even bother eating out at all? Anyway, this vendor was still going. The setup is, actually, a lot like the cold noodle setups in China. The vendor has two cauldrons - one with purple rice and one with white rice. You pick your rice, they splat it on a square of cling film/plastic wrap. They also have a mise en place of various stuff which you can choose what you want in there. There's always a vegan version, an ovo-vegetarian version, and several meat versions. Depending on the place you can pick from egg, tofu, meat, 油條 youtiao/fried dough, peanuts, pickles, meat/vege floss etc. It all gets heaped on the rice, then they roll it into a ball, put it in a plastic bag, and that's your breakfast. A good 飯糰 is about the size of a grapefruit, packed with flavor and reasonably easy to eat on the go. This one was great.
A less great breakfast was this bánh mì. Bánh mì is kind of like the "fuck it, i give up" snack for Europeans in south-east Asia. When you walk around and you can't find anything you want for breakfast, because a part of you is craving something western. The diner food isn't going to do it because that's more American than European. And anyway, there's no coffee. So you progressively get sadder and hungrier until you find the bánh mì guy, and you think, okay, yeah, a stick of French bread with some meat and veges inside? It's no brötchen, but it'll do. I probably wouldn't have bothered if they only had meat ones (which is the usual situation in Taiwan, China and Laos) but this one offered to do a vege one with some kind of mock duck or other fake meat. It was fine, as bánh mì always is. It's like a slightly less boring version of Subway, but it'll never really blow your head off with flavor. Even less so when they don't put any fresh-cut chili inside (Taiwan, le sigh). Still, i also picked up an icy passion fruit juice and some pineapple, and to be honest that shit the bomb. Eat Taiwanese pineapple, aka 自由鳳梨 "freedom pineapple" - good way to stick it to China who tried to punish us with sanctions and also improve any breakfast.
The bao situation in Taiwan is suboptimal. I mean, compared to the bao situation outside of Asia, it's great. But historically Taiwan is not in the bao belt. The local crop is rice, not wheat. Eventually they started importing wheat and making 包子 steam buns like all the rest of east Asia, but not all the popular flavors made it over the strait. In China i often got baos for breakfast, and there were a bunch of great sweet flavors like 芝麻 black sesame paste, 花生 peanut and white sugar, 紅豆饅頭 red bean mantou (better than 豆沙包 bean paste bun, which was often too sweet), 香芋 fragrant taro and 流沙 "quicksand" (custard) for those non-vegan days. Plus savory flavors like 麻辣豆腐 hot and numbing (mapo) tofu, 香菇青菜 mushroom and greens, 酸菜粉絲 pickle/cabbage and vermicelli noodle. And the king of all bun - 叉燒包 (char siu) pork bun.
Oh man, i got sidetracked reminiscing on the best buns. The thing in Taiwan is that they do have a reasonable selection of savory bun, but those are normally 水煎包 (aka 生煎包 in Guangdong) which is some kind of steam bun that subsequently got fried, i think? I don't know exactly how they cook it, but it's not in a bamboo steam basket. The buns are oily and wet rather than fluffy and dry. They are still delicious, but i find them a bit too heavy for breakfast. When it comes to actual steam buns in Taiwan, you usually only get the choice 菜包 vege bun or 肉包 meat bun. So, for this breakfast i got a vege bun. And then i got a 糖餅 sugar pastry on the side. This was similar to the black sugar pastry from the other day, but just with that slight smear of sweetness, no big ol' chunk o' jaggery. The 包 bao was fine. The 餅 bing was great.
Fast forward to another hotel breakfast. 涼麵 cold noodle is considered a breakfast dish in Taiwan, and this hotel offered something unique - a build-your-own cold noodle buffet. I figured this was my chance to make one how it's supposed to taste - with chili oil, vinegar and peanuts. It was much better than the one i got from the store, but still not great. Still, there was freedom pineapple to perk things up, plus something that Taiwan does much better than China - 豆花 bean flower aka tofu pudding. Also build-your-own! You could pick red bean or other toppings, but i just put simple syrup. Classic flavor.
This market haul was one of my best. It was from a morning market in Tainan. I got some delicious fresh papaya and pineapple, plus some 葱油餅 spring onion pancake. In the back you can see some dried/preserved sweet potato, which is a great snack i discovered in China. The local version was much sweeter than the one i used to get from the fruit shop near my house in Shenzhen, but that turned out to be worthwhile, because this was the day i cycled out to 草山月世界 Caoshan Moon World and got caught in the epic storm. I didn't get lunch, so the very sweet sweet potato i took with me gave me some energy boosts until i got more fruit and candy from the various kind strangers i met along the way.
You want a sad hotel breakfast? Here's one from the dive motel with in-room condom dispensers that i stayed my first night in Kaohsiung. Nothing on the buffet looked very appetizing, so i just made a bowl of white rice with pork (?) floss and some kind of local version of umeboshi. Scrambled eggs and cabbage on the side. Garnished with ketchup, because at this point who gives a fuck? I didn't need much because in my room i still had a mango and dragonfruit from the day before, and i happily chomped on those with a take-out cup of the fantastic espresso coffee.
Toward the end of my journey, i did end up going to a Taiwanese diner. I grabbed a 火腿蛋餅 egg pancake with ham and a 紅茶 sweet (red) tea. Little orange blobs are the sweet and sour sauce i added. It tasted... exactly like what you would expect it to taste like. Very bland. Very light. I was still hungry after. I found a place up the road that offered some more of those pastries with a dot of sugar inside, which was a more satisfying breakfast and what i ended up getting the next morning too. There was also a terrific coffee shop nearby, where i sipped on an americano while waiting for my laundry. Not really anything photogenic about these coffee shops, but man oh man. Coffee in Taiwan is really great.
My last market haul was from a wet market in Kaohsiung that i cycled through during the 228 holiday when i did a lightning trip to the south. This time i got a hotel close to the market specifically so i could get breakfast there, and it did not disappoint. The picture above is the famous 蚵仔煎 oyster omelette. This is one of the classic dishes of Taiwan and something every tourist is encouraged to try. I never had it before because i don't like seafood and i don't particularly like eggs either, but this seemed like a decent spot. The market was the kind that has meat hanging on hooks and offal flying all over the place, so i figured it wasn't going to get much fresher unless i was standing on the pier. It was... fine. Seafood, as usual, tastes like nothing to me, so it feels like a pointlessly cruel and laborious way to add salt to a dish. The omelette tasted like an omelette, with greens and beansprouts inside to give it the kind of crunch that in the west you would get from putting toast underneath. The sauce on top is an inoffensive sweet and sour thang, to which i added chili oil and chili sauce to give it a bit more kick.
It reminded me of a special dish from Melbourne Chinatown called egg chiffon. Egg chiffon is one of those "if you were there, then you know" dishes that only existed at two dive restaurants - A1 and King of Kings. For under $10 you got a mound of white rice, with a runny multiple-egg omelette on top, that had your choice of 叉燒 char siu BBQ meat cooked through it. It came with a gravy boat filled with some kind of magical MSG sauce that tasted absolutely incredible. Both those restaurants have since shut down and now you can apparently only get it at a place called Rose Garden BBQ where it is called 包蛋, which i will translate as "egg bag". Anyway, this kind of runny omelette with meat inside, and a special sauce on top, i've searched for it everywhere since leaving Melbourne and it just doesn't exist. (American 芙蓉蛋 egg foo young is much too dry.) But turns out this 蚵仔煎 is pretty close. If only they served it on rice and put char siu in it instead of oysters. Can't have everything...
Anyway, i can understand why this dish is popular. It's reasonably filling and pleasant enough. As usual with pretty much everything coming out of Taiwan slash Fujian province, it's not going to knock your socks off with flavor unless you seriously sauce it up. Bland is the name of the game in Hokkien cookery. Slightly less bland than Cantonese cookery, i suppose, but also it's less dainty and attractive. I'll get more into ugly but alright-tasting foods in future posts.
After the 蚵仔煎 i picked up a few more goodies to take back to my hotel room. The thing that looks like a pork belly is actually some kind of glutinous rice sweet that reminded me of the stuff i found in the wet markets in Laos. The other purple rice blob is also sticky rice, soft and squishy and with a marshmallow-y taste and texture. It was great. Plus... 芋頭包 taro bun! In Taiwan they look at you weird if you say 香芋 (fragrant taro) because it's a Chinese term that is not used here, but this 芋頭 was exactly the comforting flavor i remember from my favorite bun shops in Shenzhen. Really great feed for my last brekky on the road.
So that's the first round food post. I am starting to ponder why so much of how i experience a place is through the food. Maybe it's because i don't really go to visit museums or other tourist sites any more. I spend most of my holidays walking or biking - enjoying the physical process of getting from point A to point B - so the only times i pause are the times i eat. And wandering through wet markets, up and down back alleys, searching for the vendor who will have the perfect dish for me, it's always memorable. Looking at pictures of the food i ate can bring back as much about the place as a picture of the scenery. And purposefully enjoying the food encourages me to think more about the sociology and the history that brought this sustenance from the fields to my lips. Man, food is great. I love it so much, even when i hate it. I hope y'all do too, because there are probably a couple more of these to come.