Taiwan food post: dinners
Alright, let's try this. I'm tired, but i don't think i'll not be tired for quite some time. Work destroys me. Let's try to remember a time when i wasn't working. It feels like a century ago, but it was not even a couple weeks.
The dinner you see above was a deliberately unadventurous trip into 滷味, which i am not sure how best to translate. "Stewed flavor" or "braised flavor", i suppose. It's the classic flavor of Taiwan. A bubbling stock with a fivespice aroma, into which various ingredients are dunked, and then served. When you get it from a street vendor they dunk all your ingredients in the cauldron, let them stew for a bit, then pull them out and toss them into a plastic bag, and you just nibble them out of the bag with chopsticks. But after my long, exhausting first day on the road where i both got sunburnt and soaked to the core, i decided to go to the kind of fancy place i rarely do. I mean, my God, this was a restaurant that actually served their food in china bowls instead of stainless steel or plastic like my usual joints.
Make no mistake, it was still a low end eatery. But it was a franchise, with a pimply teenager serving up the meal instead of a grizzled old laoban who's been cooking the same thing for decades. The kind of place my colleages would go for lunch because they give you a printed receipt that you can use to expense the meal. Not quite a fast food chain, but definitely not a mom'n'pop. Normally i would feel dirty for going to this kind of spot, but i was done and just needed a place to sit down and something safe to eat.
It tasted completely and exactly what you would expect a franchise 滷味 would taste like. Not spicy. Not unique. Not interesting. Not surprising. Just a bowl of broth with the tofus, noodles and veges i selected beforehand floating inside. It was fine. On my way home i picked up a 豆花 tofu pudding from a street vendor that i enjoyed in my hotel room.
Night two was a much more successful meal. I had cycled all the way through Hsinchu, including long walks from Taoyuan into Hsinchu and then Hsinchu into Zhunan. I stopped at the first motel i could find in Zhunan, which turned out to be in an industrial corner of town far from the touristy temples and beach/fishing port. There was very little to choose from for dinner - just a couple of mom'n'pop places without a menu, or with just one or two key dishes listed and the rest is just whatever is there on the night.
Above is the best 魯肉飯 stewed meat rice i have ever had in Taiwan.
For those keeping track at home, 魯肉飯 is more accurately spelled 滷肉飯 where the 滷 is the same 滷 as 滷味. That stew, or stock, or braising sauce, or whatever you want to call it, that's the archetypical flavor of Taiwan in my opinion. The same way when you walk around Hong Kong you always smell 叉燒 char siu, when you walk around Taiwan you always smell 滷味 lu wei. But, if you see the 滷肉 stewed meat here, you'll notice it is dryer than the gravy-like version that is more commonly served. And instead of being fine ground meat, it's clearly chopped up chunks of pork belly. So much of Taiwanese food is kinda wet, it's a delight to get something dry. And then, not just the meat on rice, but all the fixins too! A triangle of 油豆腐 "oil" (stewed) tofu, some kind of fungus, a wedge of radish and bamboo shoots! And chili! Fresh cut chili and chives! It was spicy, juicy, tangy, fatty, crispy... Everything. Truly the best 魯肉飯.
My next stop was in an outlying suburb of Taichung, and i have to say that place was a struggle for me. It felt a lot like Taipei insofar as there was a lot of franchise restaurants of the kind i have no interest in visiting, and - quite frankly - the same ones i could visit right here in Taipei anyway so what's the point? One challenge of getting food at night after a day traveling is sometimes you just feel desperate and end up picking whatever because you need calories and can't be bothered hunting any more.
One safe choice for me is 燒烤 BBQ. It's ostensibly a Chinese cuisine, considered to be from the more "barbaric" regions like Inner Mongolia or Xinjiang, although in reality putting meat on stick and cooking it over fire is just about the simplest form of cooking there is, so it's hard to say it's especially Chinese, or Turkic, or Mongolian, or whatever. I guess what makes it 燒烤 specifically is the types of sticks you get to choose from. Unfortunately in Taiwan there is less vegetable options than there was in Chinese places, and this place was especially rough. I picked green pepper (in China this would be something more like a poblano, but in Taiwan it's bell pepper), king oyster mushroom, green beans, chives wrapped in bacon, tofu skin and a sausage. "Spicy" means they sprinkle some cayenne pepper on it. It was fine. Tasted exactly how it looks. Very suburban. Very expensive, relative to what i got. When i left i was still hungry.
So i just deciced to embrace the suburban mediocrity and get one of Taiwan's night market faves. 大腸包小腸 big-sausage-wraps-small-sausage. In big-sausage-wraps-small-sausage the big sausage is actually a tube of sticky rice, and the little sausage is a sausage. Which is to say it's a hotdog where the bun is rice. I got "spicy" (not spicy at all) pickle/kim chi inside it and sweet potato fries because clearly i had given up on life.
Ah, the famous 割包, the "gē bāo" which is actually pronounced guà bāo. I won't recount the mortifying story of me utterly failing at Chinese and then being treated like an idiot by the vendor who kept telling me "it's a Taiwanese hamburger". If you want to read that you can scroll back a handful entries. Instead i will talk about the gua bao itself, which i have to admit was an especially good one.
Gua bao is what they often call bao burger in the west. The bread is a soft, steamed bun type bread, same bread that Chinese buns/baos are made out of, and it comes in an oval shape which is folded over like a taco. Inside you get a big hunk of pork belly, plus whatever else you like. This one had a fried egg in it, and pickles, and peanuts, and greens, and hot sauce... Man, it was a really good gua bao. I just wish i hadn't been feeling so embarrassed after my exchange with the vendor and the "helpful" (not helpful at all) woman who confused me much more than necessary.
After eating the gua bao in shame, squatted in a dark and dingy alley where nobody could see me, i decided i should try to reboot my evening and actually sit down to eat at a proper restaurant. But i didn't need a big meal. So i found a place that had something i had never eaten before but was on my list to try, snapped my order out in Chinese like a pro, and sat down to wait. This is a 筒仔米糕 tube rice cake with 空心菜 ong choy/water spinach.
筒仔米糕 tube rice cake is so named because in the old days it was made by putting rice in a bamboo tube and then steaming it. This small joint used metal ring molds slid into a big, blocky steamer like they used in Guangdong for steaming 腸粉 cheung fun. It's topped with the ubiquitous small helping of pork, but this pork was something like (but not the same as) char siu BBQ pork. The sauce was sort of sweet and sour BBQ sauce, with a bit of cilantro on it. Flavors that wouldn't be out of place in American BBQ to be honest. The tube rice had that slightly crispy edge from cooking in the tube and a chewiness that you don't get with the steamed short grain varieties a lot of places serve in Taiwan. It was really delicious. Will definitely be eating tube rice again.
Heading on to Douliu, where i was caught in a rainstorm and also at probably the worst and most painful day of sunburn all trip, i decided to get the best small town comfort food i could think of. I went to a dumpling place near the temple and got me a bamboo steamer full of steamed dumplings. (No choice of flavor, just dumpling or bun.) They were very, very good dumplings. Not the kinda sauce-drenched dumple gobble i had a bit later for lunch in Kaohsiung, but a civilized, high-class dumpling extravaganza, the kind where you get a little dish to mix your own chili oil and vinegar. It felt very upscale for me, although the venue was still the kind of local joint i love. Maybe the vibe was different because dumplings encourage more communal eating than the diners and dives i normally eat at. There were a couple of families there drinking and gossiping and savoring the steamed treats. Very nice.
Down in Chiayi i was somewhat less successful at finding delicious food. As a reminder, Chiayi was also where i had had a very unremarkable lunch of sesame sauce noodles with way too much bland ground pork heaped on top of it. I resolved to go to a vegetarian place for dinner, but the only one that was open was a middle class health food sort of a place. The only thing i felt like was fried rice. It was served on a porcelain plate (boo!) with edamame and furikake and all the Japanese-style stuff that signifies a higher class of cuisine in Taiwan. Some cabbage/pickle on the side.
Since the fried rice all felt a bit too healthy, i decided to sneak into a 85°C café and get a pastry for dessert. And then i balanced that out with fresh guava.
Interesting thing about 85°C - when i came to Taiwan about 5 years ago, it seemed like one of the more popular local coffee chains. It's kind of silly to go to a local coffee chain in Taiwan because you can also go to a convenience store (7/11, FamilyMart etc) and they all have coffee machines in the back that make espresso coffees better than western coffee chains like Starbucks, and they cost less than half the price. But sometimes there is something nice about getting coffee from a coffee shop over a convenience store, even when the coffee shop is a chain. 85°C was my go-to because they had lots of little cakes in the window like a European coffee shop, and a pretty red storefront, and the first one i ever went to had a nice server so i made it my ritual to keep going there.
In China, 85°C also existed, and until KFC started selling K咖啡 K-coffee, it was the only place in the country to get consistently decent coffee. (Starbucks, of course, serves consistently indecent coffee.) So i went to 85°C all the time in China, and i was going there at exactly the time that Tsai Ing-wen (president of Taiwan) famously visited the 85°C branch in Los Angeles, and then the Chinese nationalists had a massive shit-fit online and 85°C had to issue a groveling apology for "hurting the feelings of the Chinese people". For weeks afterwards there were signs up in the front of all the 85°C locations in China disavowing Taiwan independence and reinforcing their commitment to "One China" and bla bla bla. It's just fucking ridiculous what companies are expected to do to operate in China.
Anyway, now i am back in Taiwan, and living here, 85°C is less popular than it used to be. Not sure if it's a result of their kowtowing to Xi Jinping and his Chinese nationalist outrage brigade, or if it's just that the latest trend has moved on to some other coffee chain. I don't think i've seen a single store in Taipei (although i know some exist), and the location i used to visit in Kaohsiung is long gone. But in the smaller towns of Taiwan it's still going strong, and it's still not a terrible option, although there are dozens of smaller franchises or family-owned spots that make better coffee at the same price.
But! 85°C has cake. Their speciality is Japanese-style tiny elegant cakes with many layers, but they do some of the European faves too like 黑森林蛋糕 (Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte/black forest cake). And sometimes - not at all locations - you'll get absurd mash-ups like that incredible hotdog and custard danish i loved from the location near my work in Shenzhen, or - pictured above - a croissant-type thing with taro paste inside. So good.
The guava was good too.
Okay, fuck it. Tainan was the point where i said to myself, i am officially done with mostly-bland Taiwanese food and i am going out of my way to hunt down something that will make me truly happy. When i eat at home, every single night i have eye-blisteringly, nose-runningly, ass-burningly spicy food the way it should be cooked. I needed some Sichuan food. But most so-called Sichuan food in Taiwan is offensively bland, especially when you eat at the low end places i tend to eat at. (Of course if you go to "casual dining" level you can visit chain restaurants like 海底撈 Haidilao - with branches all over the world, including Taiwan - that will do proper Sichuan spicy, if you can stomach the obnoxiousness of going to a chain restaurant in the first place.)
This was proper Sichuan spicy. According to a Google Maps reviewer, the owner was legitimately from Sichuan province. And, what's more, it was a hole-in-the-wall plastic stool joint a couple kilometers walk away from any of the touristy corners of town. They only had 涼麵 cold noodle, 小麵 xiaomian "small noodle" soup, 麻婆豆腐 mapo tofu and a couple of meat-centric dishes i remember from the menus in China but never ordered because there they had had potato, green bean and dry tofu options too. Despite the meat, i wanted to order one of everything. But instead i just ordered a mapo tofu, and i nearly cried when it came out. That bright red chili oil coating everything. Brownish black flakes were 花椒 - numbing Sichuan pepper, not some bland-ass white pepper like your usual Taiwanese joint. The 豆瓣醬 (bean segment sauce) that is used to make the base of the sauce actually had bean segments. It was so good!
I mean, it was far from the best mapo tofu i've had in my life. But it was definitely the best one i've had in Taiwan. It made me so happy.
Moving on to Kaohsiung, i kept with the theme of getting non-Taiwanese food for dinner. I was out in a suburban area and it all felt very samey - either franchises or mom'n'pop joints serving the same stuff i'd seen all over the rest of Taiwan. But then i found this one place offering 肉骨茶 "meat bone tea" or bak kut teh. That was literally the only thing on the menu. It was a small but cheerful-looking place with musical memorabilia all over the walls, blasting frantic jazz music out the door at a riotous volume. I felt like i had walked into an anime. The laoban told me he used work in Singapore and Malaysia for 15 years and when he came back to Taiwan he wanted to bring that taste back here.
Bak kut teh, then, is a Singapore/Malaysian dish from the ethnic Chinese community of that region. There is a dry version and a wet version. There was a Malaysian girl sitting at the next table over who laoban suggested i ask for recommendation. She suggested in an unabashed mish-mash of Chinese and English that the dry version with "fries" was her fave. I didn't realize until later that by "fries" (English word) she meant sliced up 油條 youtiao/fried dough, which is one of the traditional accompaniments. I just got the default of white rice, but the bak kut teh was still bomb, especially with the the chili lime dipping sauce. The star of the show is a few massive chunks of pork rib that i don't even know how you cut without a gotdamned chainsaw. A whole bunch of different veges, some ikan bilis (aka 小魚 or anchovies), chilis, man i don't even know what they dumped in that pot, but i will tell you one thing... it came out sizzling like some cheesy-ass fajita show.
And - just after i had finally recovered from my sunburn - i pushed the bowl away a couple inches so i could fit my rice bowl in between. You know what's coming. The skin practically melted off my right hand. Started blossoming up within a few seconds and the rest of my holiday i couldn't hold chopsticks very well. Even more annoyingly, literally just last week i managed to drop my kettle in the sink, and when i tried to grab it i ended up pouring just-boiled water all over my left hand, whose skin is now still peeling off as i type this. I swear to God, the last month or so i have gotten as many burns on my body as several years of misfortune all put together. It has been brutal.
Anyway, the bak kut teh was pretty good. Extremely deep and rich flavors. It was also a serious test of chopstick skills lifting up those rib bones and prizing all the meat off without anything going flying across the table.
The other great thing on this dish was the side of 空心菜 ong choy/water spinach, which was done in the southeast Asian way, with plenty of garlic and sweet/dark soy. Solid meal. I probably wouldn't eat it again because it takes more effort to wrangle the bone than the meat is worth, but it was nice to get another dish that had a strong sock to the face of flavor in it. You start to forget how bland Taiwanese food is when that's all you eat all the time.
And here it is. I think probably the highlight of my whole journey. In Kaohsiung, right near the central train station, there is an Indonesian cafeteria. It's not a snazzy high end "overseas cuisine" restaurant. It is a restaurant by and for the migrant workers. Cheap prices. Hearty dishes. And would you believe it? They had a vegan dish. It might look ugly in the picture, but that's only because it's smothered in thick, spicy satay. Ketoprak is a salad from Jakarta similar to gado gado but with more tofu.
Indonesian food is in my blood, because on my mother's side are the filthy Dutch colonizers who greedily took all the delicious food back with them to Holland where still today it makes up a segment of their fast food staples. I grew up eating nasi goreng, bami goreng, satay, tempeh, you name it. Indonesian food probably predates Chinese food as my childhood idea of what "Asian" cuisine meant. So this was a taste of home for me.
Under the blanket of satay sauce, this ketoprak was made out of tofu, tempeh, bean sprouts, cucumber, green beans, cabbage and tiny balls of glutinous rice. And sambal! Oh, lord, the sambal! I wept! Well, okay, i didn't weep i just ate the salad. But it was the best thing in the world. And krupuk (prawn crackers)! And sweet tea! Yes! Yes! Yes!
Man, just looking at it i can taste it again. I mean, i had a great 魯肉飯 in Zhunan and a great mapo tofu in Tainan but that stuff is all more or less Chinese/Taiwanese cuisine that theoretically is available everywhere, or at least you can buy the ingredients and make it at home. But this is the sort of thing, you only gonna get it where there is a critical mass of migrant workers. So good. Definitely going to be a stop next time i am in Kaohsiung. I don't know if we have anywhere like it up here in white collar Taipei.
My last little excursion to not-exactly-Taiwanese food was at a little Hong Kong café, also in Kaohsiung. I was hoping to get a 叉燒包 pork bun, and this place did indeed have those and they were fine, but for the main dish i got a 炒河粉 "chow fun" noodle, a classic dish of Guangzhou that is also popular in Hong Kong, Shenzhen and all round the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong. In Shenzhen i used to get this made by street vendors who would cook it to order, smoke billowing up from their woks balanced precariously on the backs of electric trikes or push carts on the side of the road. I always asked for - and got - fresh chopped chili tossed in there with bean sprouts, scrambled egg, chives and occasionally some bok choy, green beans or carrots.
This place was a legit Hong Kong expat joint. Cantonese music on the radio. Laoban talk Cantonese to his buddies. Hong Kong memorabilia on the walls. But perhaps it was a little bit too authentic. When you lived in Shenzhen and ate Cantonese street food every day, then crossing the border into Hong Kong and getting the same dishes it always felt a bit blander, a bit safer, a bit more westernized. This was way more Hong Kong style than Shenzhen/Guangdong style. I mean, canned mushrooms!? A very mediocre 河粉, maybe something that would give the familiar flavors to Hongkongers who are sad that they can't live freely in their own city any more, but it unfortunately did not hit the spot i was hoping for. Really what made this dinner was the Hong Kong ambiance. At moments i could briefly imagine i was back in the city that captured my heart as a youngster over 3 decades ago.
Perhaps it's fitting that my last dinner on the road was back to solid Taiwanese fare - 粿條. In Hokkien 粿條 is pronounced kway teow and makes up the core of the famous Singapore/Malaysian dish 炒粿條 char kway teow, which actually is almost exactly the same dish as 炒河粉. Both Cantonese 河粉 and Hokkien 粿條 are thick rice noodles. 粿條 literally means "cake strip". I guess because the noodle is made from steaming squished-up rice into a cake-like blob and then cutting it into strips.
Anyway, i am sure some people would argue that there is a more than just a linguistic difference between 河粉 and 粿條 rice noodles. Culinarily speaking, the main difference to me is that in Guangdong when they make 河粉 it is usually fried, whereas in Taiwan when you get 粿條 it is usually boiled. You can get it wet (in which case it is in a bowl of soup like Vietnamese pho) or dry. Well "dry" because as you can see the dry version i ordered is often still fairly wet. 豆芽 bean sprouts on top. 地瓜葉 sweet potato greens on the side. No spicy. Taiwanese AF. You couldn't get a more Taiwanese dish if you tried. Well, you could, and it would be 滷味. But you know what i mean.
And, you know? This Taiwanese version of the rice noodle was better than the Cantonese version of the rice noodle. Because i am in Taiwan. And here they make Taiwanese food the best.
The moral of the story is even though sometimes the local food can be very bland and even outright bad, when it's good it's almost always going to be a very good version of whatever it is.
The other moral of the story is that Indonesian food is awesome, but we already knew that.
Also work sucks. That is all. Good night.
The dinner you see above was a deliberately unadventurous trip into 滷味, which i am not sure how best to translate. "Stewed flavor" or "braised flavor", i suppose. It's the classic flavor of Taiwan. A bubbling stock with a fivespice aroma, into which various ingredients are dunked, and then served. When you get it from a street vendor they dunk all your ingredients in the cauldron, let them stew for a bit, then pull them out and toss them into a plastic bag, and you just nibble them out of the bag with chopsticks. But after my long, exhausting first day on the road where i both got sunburnt and soaked to the core, i decided to go to the kind of fancy place i rarely do. I mean, my God, this was a restaurant that actually served their food in china bowls instead of stainless steel or plastic like my usual joints.
Make no mistake, it was still a low end eatery. But it was a franchise, with a pimply teenager serving up the meal instead of a grizzled old laoban who's been cooking the same thing for decades. The kind of place my colleages would go for lunch because they give you a printed receipt that you can use to expense the meal. Not quite a fast food chain, but definitely not a mom'n'pop. Normally i would feel dirty for going to this kind of spot, but i was done and just needed a place to sit down and something safe to eat.
It tasted completely and exactly what you would expect a franchise 滷味 would taste like. Not spicy. Not unique. Not interesting. Not surprising. Just a bowl of broth with the tofus, noodles and veges i selected beforehand floating inside. It was fine. On my way home i picked up a 豆花 tofu pudding from a street vendor that i enjoyed in my hotel room.
Night two was a much more successful meal. I had cycled all the way through Hsinchu, including long walks from Taoyuan into Hsinchu and then Hsinchu into Zhunan. I stopped at the first motel i could find in Zhunan, which turned out to be in an industrial corner of town far from the touristy temples and beach/fishing port. There was very little to choose from for dinner - just a couple of mom'n'pop places without a menu, or with just one or two key dishes listed and the rest is just whatever is there on the night.
Above is the best 魯肉飯 stewed meat rice i have ever had in Taiwan.
For those keeping track at home, 魯肉飯 is more accurately spelled 滷肉飯 where the 滷 is the same 滷 as 滷味. That stew, or stock, or braising sauce, or whatever you want to call it, that's the archetypical flavor of Taiwan in my opinion. The same way when you walk around Hong Kong you always smell 叉燒 char siu, when you walk around Taiwan you always smell 滷味 lu wei. But, if you see the 滷肉 stewed meat here, you'll notice it is dryer than the gravy-like version that is more commonly served. And instead of being fine ground meat, it's clearly chopped up chunks of pork belly. So much of Taiwanese food is kinda wet, it's a delight to get something dry. And then, not just the meat on rice, but all the fixins too! A triangle of 油豆腐 "oil" (stewed) tofu, some kind of fungus, a wedge of radish and bamboo shoots! And chili! Fresh cut chili and chives! It was spicy, juicy, tangy, fatty, crispy... Everything. Truly the best 魯肉飯.
My next stop was in an outlying suburb of Taichung, and i have to say that place was a struggle for me. It felt a lot like Taipei insofar as there was a lot of franchise restaurants of the kind i have no interest in visiting, and - quite frankly - the same ones i could visit right here in Taipei anyway so what's the point? One challenge of getting food at night after a day traveling is sometimes you just feel desperate and end up picking whatever because you need calories and can't be bothered hunting any more.
One safe choice for me is 燒烤 BBQ. It's ostensibly a Chinese cuisine, considered to be from the more "barbaric" regions like Inner Mongolia or Xinjiang, although in reality putting meat on stick and cooking it over fire is just about the simplest form of cooking there is, so it's hard to say it's especially Chinese, or Turkic, or Mongolian, or whatever. I guess what makes it 燒烤 specifically is the types of sticks you get to choose from. Unfortunately in Taiwan there is less vegetable options than there was in Chinese places, and this place was especially rough. I picked green pepper (in China this would be something more like a poblano, but in Taiwan it's bell pepper), king oyster mushroom, green beans, chives wrapped in bacon, tofu skin and a sausage. "Spicy" means they sprinkle some cayenne pepper on it. It was fine. Tasted exactly how it looks. Very suburban. Very expensive, relative to what i got. When i left i was still hungry.
So i just deciced to embrace the suburban mediocrity and get one of Taiwan's night market faves. 大腸包小腸 big-sausage-wraps-small-sausage. In big-sausage-wraps-small-sausage the big sausage is actually a tube of sticky rice, and the little sausage is a sausage. Which is to say it's a hotdog where the bun is rice. I got "spicy" (not spicy at all) pickle/kim chi inside it and sweet potato fries because clearly i had given up on life.
Ah, the famous 割包, the "gē bāo" which is actually pronounced guà bāo. I won't recount the mortifying story of me utterly failing at Chinese and then being treated like an idiot by the vendor who kept telling me "it's a Taiwanese hamburger". If you want to read that you can scroll back a handful entries. Instead i will talk about the gua bao itself, which i have to admit was an especially good one.
Gua bao is what they often call bao burger in the west. The bread is a soft, steamed bun type bread, same bread that Chinese buns/baos are made out of, and it comes in an oval shape which is folded over like a taco. Inside you get a big hunk of pork belly, plus whatever else you like. This one had a fried egg in it, and pickles, and peanuts, and greens, and hot sauce... Man, it was a really good gua bao. I just wish i hadn't been feeling so embarrassed after my exchange with the vendor and the "helpful" (not helpful at all) woman who confused me much more than necessary.
After eating the gua bao in shame, squatted in a dark and dingy alley where nobody could see me, i decided i should try to reboot my evening and actually sit down to eat at a proper restaurant. But i didn't need a big meal. So i found a place that had something i had never eaten before but was on my list to try, snapped my order out in Chinese like a pro, and sat down to wait. This is a 筒仔米糕 tube rice cake with 空心菜 ong choy/water spinach.
筒仔米糕 tube rice cake is so named because in the old days it was made by putting rice in a bamboo tube and then steaming it. This small joint used metal ring molds slid into a big, blocky steamer like they used in Guangdong for steaming 腸粉 cheung fun. It's topped with the ubiquitous small helping of pork, but this pork was something like (but not the same as) char siu BBQ pork. The sauce was sort of sweet and sour BBQ sauce, with a bit of cilantro on it. Flavors that wouldn't be out of place in American BBQ to be honest. The tube rice had that slightly crispy edge from cooking in the tube and a chewiness that you don't get with the steamed short grain varieties a lot of places serve in Taiwan. It was really delicious. Will definitely be eating tube rice again.
Heading on to Douliu, where i was caught in a rainstorm and also at probably the worst and most painful day of sunburn all trip, i decided to get the best small town comfort food i could think of. I went to a dumpling place near the temple and got me a bamboo steamer full of steamed dumplings. (No choice of flavor, just dumpling or bun.) They were very, very good dumplings. Not the kinda sauce-drenched dumple gobble i had a bit later for lunch in Kaohsiung, but a civilized, high-class dumpling extravaganza, the kind where you get a little dish to mix your own chili oil and vinegar. It felt very upscale for me, although the venue was still the kind of local joint i love. Maybe the vibe was different because dumplings encourage more communal eating than the diners and dives i normally eat at. There were a couple of families there drinking and gossiping and savoring the steamed treats. Very nice.
Down in Chiayi i was somewhat less successful at finding delicious food. As a reminder, Chiayi was also where i had had a very unremarkable lunch of sesame sauce noodles with way too much bland ground pork heaped on top of it. I resolved to go to a vegetarian place for dinner, but the only one that was open was a middle class health food sort of a place. The only thing i felt like was fried rice. It was served on a porcelain plate (boo!) with edamame and furikake and all the Japanese-style stuff that signifies a higher class of cuisine in Taiwan. Some cabbage/pickle on the side.
Since the fried rice all felt a bit too healthy, i decided to sneak into a 85°C café and get a pastry for dessert. And then i balanced that out with fresh guava.
Interesting thing about 85°C - when i came to Taiwan about 5 years ago, it seemed like one of the more popular local coffee chains. It's kind of silly to go to a local coffee chain in Taiwan because you can also go to a convenience store (7/11, FamilyMart etc) and they all have coffee machines in the back that make espresso coffees better than western coffee chains like Starbucks, and they cost less than half the price. But sometimes there is something nice about getting coffee from a coffee shop over a convenience store, even when the coffee shop is a chain. 85°C was my go-to because they had lots of little cakes in the window like a European coffee shop, and a pretty red storefront, and the first one i ever went to had a nice server so i made it my ritual to keep going there.
In China, 85°C also existed, and until KFC started selling K咖啡 K-coffee, it was the only place in the country to get consistently decent coffee. (Starbucks, of course, serves consistently indecent coffee.) So i went to 85°C all the time in China, and i was going there at exactly the time that Tsai Ing-wen (president of Taiwan) famously visited the 85°C branch in Los Angeles, and then the Chinese nationalists had a massive shit-fit online and 85°C had to issue a groveling apology for "hurting the feelings of the Chinese people". For weeks afterwards there were signs up in the front of all the 85°C locations in China disavowing Taiwan independence and reinforcing their commitment to "One China" and bla bla bla. It's just fucking ridiculous what companies are expected to do to operate in China.
Anyway, now i am back in Taiwan, and living here, 85°C is less popular than it used to be. Not sure if it's a result of their kowtowing to Xi Jinping and his Chinese nationalist outrage brigade, or if it's just that the latest trend has moved on to some other coffee chain. I don't think i've seen a single store in Taipei (although i know some exist), and the location i used to visit in Kaohsiung is long gone. But in the smaller towns of Taiwan it's still going strong, and it's still not a terrible option, although there are dozens of smaller franchises or family-owned spots that make better coffee at the same price.
But! 85°C has cake. Their speciality is Japanese-style tiny elegant cakes with many layers, but they do some of the European faves too like 黑森林蛋糕 (Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte/black forest cake). And sometimes - not at all locations - you'll get absurd mash-ups like that incredible hotdog and custard danish i loved from the location near my work in Shenzhen, or - pictured above - a croissant-type thing with taro paste inside. So good.
The guava was good too.
Okay, fuck it. Tainan was the point where i said to myself, i am officially done with mostly-bland Taiwanese food and i am going out of my way to hunt down something that will make me truly happy. When i eat at home, every single night i have eye-blisteringly, nose-runningly, ass-burningly spicy food the way it should be cooked. I needed some Sichuan food. But most so-called Sichuan food in Taiwan is offensively bland, especially when you eat at the low end places i tend to eat at. (Of course if you go to "casual dining" level you can visit chain restaurants like 海底撈 Haidilao - with branches all over the world, including Taiwan - that will do proper Sichuan spicy, if you can stomach the obnoxiousness of going to a chain restaurant in the first place.)
This was proper Sichuan spicy. According to a Google Maps reviewer, the owner was legitimately from Sichuan province. And, what's more, it was a hole-in-the-wall plastic stool joint a couple kilometers walk away from any of the touristy corners of town. They only had 涼麵 cold noodle, 小麵 xiaomian "small noodle" soup, 麻婆豆腐 mapo tofu and a couple of meat-centric dishes i remember from the menus in China but never ordered because there they had had potato, green bean and dry tofu options too. Despite the meat, i wanted to order one of everything. But instead i just ordered a mapo tofu, and i nearly cried when it came out. That bright red chili oil coating everything. Brownish black flakes were 花椒 - numbing Sichuan pepper, not some bland-ass white pepper like your usual Taiwanese joint. The 豆瓣醬 (bean segment sauce) that is used to make the base of the sauce actually had bean segments. It was so good!
I mean, it was far from the best mapo tofu i've had in my life. But it was definitely the best one i've had in Taiwan. It made me so happy.
Moving on to Kaohsiung, i kept with the theme of getting non-Taiwanese food for dinner. I was out in a suburban area and it all felt very samey - either franchises or mom'n'pop joints serving the same stuff i'd seen all over the rest of Taiwan. But then i found this one place offering 肉骨茶 "meat bone tea" or bak kut teh. That was literally the only thing on the menu. It was a small but cheerful-looking place with musical memorabilia all over the walls, blasting frantic jazz music out the door at a riotous volume. I felt like i had walked into an anime. The laoban told me he used work in Singapore and Malaysia for 15 years and when he came back to Taiwan he wanted to bring that taste back here.
Bak kut teh, then, is a Singapore/Malaysian dish from the ethnic Chinese community of that region. There is a dry version and a wet version. There was a Malaysian girl sitting at the next table over who laoban suggested i ask for recommendation. She suggested in an unabashed mish-mash of Chinese and English that the dry version with "fries" was her fave. I didn't realize until later that by "fries" (English word) she meant sliced up 油條 youtiao/fried dough, which is one of the traditional accompaniments. I just got the default of white rice, but the bak kut teh was still bomb, especially with the the chili lime dipping sauce. The star of the show is a few massive chunks of pork rib that i don't even know how you cut without a gotdamned chainsaw. A whole bunch of different veges, some ikan bilis (aka 小魚 or anchovies), chilis, man i don't even know what they dumped in that pot, but i will tell you one thing... it came out sizzling like some cheesy-ass fajita show.
And - just after i had finally recovered from my sunburn - i pushed the bowl away a couple inches so i could fit my rice bowl in between. You know what's coming. The skin practically melted off my right hand. Started blossoming up within a few seconds and the rest of my holiday i couldn't hold chopsticks very well. Even more annoyingly, literally just last week i managed to drop my kettle in the sink, and when i tried to grab it i ended up pouring just-boiled water all over my left hand, whose skin is now still peeling off as i type this. I swear to God, the last month or so i have gotten as many burns on my body as several years of misfortune all put together. It has been brutal.
Anyway, the bak kut teh was pretty good. Extremely deep and rich flavors. It was also a serious test of chopstick skills lifting up those rib bones and prizing all the meat off without anything going flying across the table.
The other great thing on this dish was the side of 空心菜 ong choy/water spinach, which was done in the southeast Asian way, with plenty of garlic and sweet/dark soy. Solid meal. I probably wouldn't eat it again because it takes more effort to wrangle the bone than the meat is worth, but it was nice to get another dish that had a strong sock to the face of flavor in it. You start to forget how bland Taiwanese food is when that's all you eat all the time.
And here it is. I think probably the highlight of my whole journey. In Kaohsiung, right near the central train station, there is an Indonesian cafeteria. It's not a snazzy high end "overseas cuisine" restaurant. It is a restaurant by and for the migrant workers. Cheap prices. Hearty dishes. And would you believe it? They had a vegan dish. It might look ugly in the picture, but that's only because it's smothered in thick, spicy satay. Ketoprak is a salad from Jakarta similar to gado gado but with more tofu.
Indonesian food is in my blood, because on my mother's side are the filthy Dutch colonizers who greedily took all the delicious food back with them to Holland where still today it makes up a segment of their fast food staples. I grew up eating nasi goreng, bami goreng, satay, tempeh, you name it. Indonesian food probably predates Chinese food as my childhood idea of what "Asian" cuisine meant. So this was a taste of home for me.
Under the blanket of satay sauce, this ketoprak was made out of tofu, tempeh, bean sprouts, cucumber, green beans, cabbage and tiny balls of glutinous rice. And sambal! Oh, lord, the sambal! I wept! Well, okay, i didn't weep i just ate the salad. But it was the best thing in the world. And krupuk (prawn crackers)! And sweet tea! Yes! Yes! Yes!
Man, just looking at it i can taste it again. I mean, i had a great 魯肉飯 in Zhunan and a great mapo tofu in Tainan but that stuff is all more or less Chinese/Taiwanese cuisine that theoretically is available everywhere, or at least you can buy the ingredients and make it at home. But this is the sort of thing, you only gonna get it where there is a critical mass of migrant workers. So good. Definitely going to be a stop next time i am in Kaohsiung. I don't know if we have anywhere like it up here in white collar Taipei.
My last little excursion to not-exactly-Taiwanese food was at a little Hong Kong café, also in Kaohsiung. I was hoping to get a 叉燒包 pork bun, and this place did indeed have those and they were fine, but for the main dish i got a 炒河粉 "chow fun" noodle, a classic dish of Guangzhou that is also popular in Hong Kong, Shenzhen and all round the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong. In Shenzhen i used to get this made by street vendors who would cook it to order, smoke billowing up from their woks balanced precariously on the backs of electric trikes or push carts on the side of the road. I always asked for - and got - fresh chopped chili tossed in there with bean sprouts, scrambled egg, chives and occasionally some bok choy, green beans or carrots.
This place was a legit Hong Kong expat joint. Cantonese music on the radio. Laoban talk Cantonese to his buddies. Hong Kong memorabilia on the walls. But perhaps it was a little bit too authentic. When you lived in Shenzhen and ate Cantonese street food every day, then crossing the border into Hong Kong and getting the same dishes it always felt a bit blander, a bit safer, a bit more westernized. This was way more Hong Kong style than Shenzhen/Guangdong style. I mean, canned mushrooms!? A very mediocre 河粉, maybe something that would give the familiar flavors to Hongkongers who are sad that they can't live freely in their own city any more, but it unfortunately did not hit the spot i was hoping for. Really what made this dinner was the Hong Kong ambiance. At moments i could briefly imagine i was back in the city that captured my heart as a youngster over 3 decades ago.
Perhaps it's fitting that my last dinner on the road was back to solid Taiwanese fare - 粿條. In Hokkien 粿條 is pronounced kway teow and makes up the core of the famous Singapore/Malaysian dish 炒粿條 char kway teow, which actually is almost exactly the same dish as 炒河粉. Both Cantonese 河粉 and Hokkien 粿條 are thick rice noodles. 粿條 literally means "cake strip". I guess because the noodle is made from steaming squished-up rice into a cake-like blob and then cutting it into strips.
Anyway, i am sure some people would argue that there is a more than just a linguistic difference between 河粉 and 粿條 rice noodles. Culinarily speaking, the main difference to me is that in Guangdong when they make 河粉 it is usually fried, whereas in Taiwan when you get 粿條 it is usually boiled. You can get it wet (in which case it is in a bowl of soup like Vietnamese pho) or dry. Well "dry" because as you can see the dry version i ordered is often still fairly wet. 豆芽 bean sprouts on top. 地瓜葉 sweet potato greens on the side. No spicy. Taiwanese AF. You couldn't get a more Taiwanese dish if you tried. Well, you could, and it would be 滷味. But you know what i mean.
And, you know? This Taiwanese version of the rice noodle was better than the Cantonese version of the rice noodle. Because i am in Taiwan. And here they make Taiwanese food the best.
The moral of the story is even though sometimes the local food can be very bland and even outright bad, when it's good it's almost always going to be a very good version of whatever it is.
The other moral of the story is that Indonesian food is awesome, but we already knew that.
Also work sucks. That is all. Good night.