What Indonesia Has Allowed Me To Eat

I haven’t written about Indonesia because, to put it bluntly, it hasn’t given me much to write about. That’s only partially Indonesia’s fault, at least directly. The rest of it is, depending on how you look at it, either not Indonesia’s fault or Indonesia’s fault only indirectly for making me too sick to either be able to eat or care about eating once I was technically able to.

Not to heap more jabs upon Indonesia, but I’m happy to have gotten sick here instead of a country whose food I was more excited about eating.

I went to Yogyakarta for deep-seated reasons that traced all the way back to 2007. When I lived in Papua, I was offered the chance to travel to Yogyakarta to see Borobudur, Prambanan, and all the rest of it, and declined because I thought it would be too expensive. Instead, I spent my winter holiday steaming (and getting food poisoning, too, actually) on Biak, where my then-boyfriend and I got chased out of several hotels for not being married. And then the one that we made it into had doors that only locked from the outside. Creepy!

Anyway, this is all a very long way of saying that I didn’t go to Yogyakarta for the food; I went there to fulfill a 10-year-old regret, and as far as that went: success! The temples were beautiful and unique. As far as the food: research before arriving taught me that food in Yogyakarta is known even among Indonesians for being very sweet. I have trouble with sweetness even when no one else does, so that didn’t bode well.

I will say that, despite (or perhaps because of?) the torrential sugar downpours on all of its food, Yogyakarta is the cheapest place I’ve ever eaten, with no meal ever costing more than $2.50 and most costing under $1. Once I got used to what was likely and not likely to be encrusted with sugar (and what I would and would not tolerate as far as that went) I had some decent meals.

There was the ever-present lele, or small catfish, grilled or fried and served with a square of tempeh, a bowl of white rice, cucumbers, and sambal. The best version was at Waroeng Wiratama Spesial Ikan Bakar, whose sambal was brown, savory, and fiery, not sweet at all.

There was gudeg, an unripe jackfruit curry with loads of spices on paper, but mainly candlenut and palm sugar on the tongue. I had it at Yu Djum, which was the place unanimously recommended to me by everyone on the street and every rating on the internet.

I’ll admit that Indonesia has great soto ayam (chicken soup) although after it being the only thing I could stomach for a week, I never want to eat it again. At its crunchy-garlicky, liver-containing, clean-silky-spinach floating, comfort-food best, it was served outside Borobudur Temple next to a shuttle bus stop.

There was a street stall setting rujak es krim, which consists of several things I don’t like placed together to make something delicious and very refreshing on a hot day. The first component is a pinkish gummy ice cream reminiscent of nail polish remover. The second is copious amounts of sugar syrup. And the third is fruits and vegetables totally inappropriate for sugar syrup being rolled in that sugar syrup: mainly cucumber, green papaya, and mango. But put them together in a bowl and it was almost the best thing I ate in Yogyakarta.

Ubud, Bali, promised to be better, but promptly gave me food poisoning a day after I set foot in it, probably because I stooped to the level of having an avocado salad and a multi-veggie juice at a Western-tourist-oriented place with no other customers – or perhaps because I went to a rib joint and ordered vegetables in bean sauce. In any case, it was a number of days before I could venture out and sample Ubud’s crunchy-granola hippie food. A few eggplant-nori wraps, avocado-seed shakes, pumpkin soups, pistachio gelatos, and kale quinoa breakfast bowls later, I had found my way back to being able to order and digest a wickedly wonderful plate of nasi goreng babi from Warung Makan Bu Rus.

If you’ve spent any time in Indonesia, you know that nasi goreng can either be a feast or a throwaway food that someone mushed together from rice, MSG, and old vegetable trimmings in a wok in his backyard. I’ve had almost exclusively the latter, and after being burned several times, I stopped ordering it somewhere in late 2006.

This nasi goreng was not that. Each vegetable was crisp and accented against the backdrop of the sweet, slick, and savory rice that tasted too of toasted coconut. But the vegetables faded into the background once one of the two precious sticks of pork satay had been tasted, and the rest of the meal planned around how best to maximize the bites so they’d be evenly spread out until the plate was gone. The pork pieces alternated firm (but not chewy) and fatty (but melty rather than gummy) and had a barbecue-flavored glaze that, yes, was definitely palm-sugar based, but allowed the sugar to stay in the background of the smoke.

I’m hoping this meal was a turning point, and that I’ll be able to sample some more particularly Balinese meals like babi guling, bebek betutu, and lawar, not to mention some fresh seafood in the south, near Uluwatu, where I’m going next, but I’ll have to wait for the Galungan holiday to be over before the more traditional places open up again. Until then, it’s back to crunchy hippie food for me, and there are definitely worse fates than that.

Review: Destination 4 (Southern Vietnam)

Vietnam is a well-established favorite of mine, food-wise, so I had high expectations. There was less blindly blundering into new taste experiences, and more of me marching around looking for some obscure street stand I last saw four years ago (usually unsuccessfully, though I did find the same two ladies churning out papaya salad in Lê Văn Tám Park!). There was also more of me complaining that the price of street smoothies has nearly doubled (from $.50 to $1) and about the mysterious disappearance of mangosteen, but overall I reacquainted myself with the things I most love about Vietnamese food: nothing is ever served unadorned by at least 8 different kinds of vegetables, or without the requisite bowl of fish sauce.

New dishes/ingredients tried that I’d never tried before:

 
Hearts of palm:
OK, I’ve probably had these before in salad, but these were braised like jackfruit when it’s trying to be fake meat, and looked like they were going to chew like shoe leather, but fell apart in the mouth pleasingly

Tonkin jasmine buds:
These were stir-fried simply with just a little bit of garlic at the extremely upscale Victoria Hotel in Châu Đốc. The dining room was full of raucous Australian seniors on a tour eating a fixed-menu meal, so we ate on the balcony overlooking the river and got covered in mosquitos as I savored these crisp buds, which tasted just like tea.

Green banana soup:
This was full of tofu and perilla leaves in addition to the bananas.

Conch:
It’s possible that an elderly Vietnamese gentleman fed me conch off a toothpick once at Cafe Artist in Garden Grove CA. However, if that was a different kind of snail, then this was my first time eating conch, which is a slender, coiled mollusk so sizable that it was served cut into four pieces inside its shell, after being drenched in fish sauce and grilled. After I ate the pieces, I drank the fish saucy juice!

Vietnamese olives
These sat in almost every market in the section with the fruit, looking like velour-covered pebbles. I had no idea what they were until Châu Đốc, where they were also displayed peeled and marinated. Oddly, the marinade was sugary.

Dried persimmon
Set in stacks in the Đà Lạt market, the kind we sampled, the one in the open that flies were landing on, was sweet and had a great bite to it. The one we bought, the shrink-wrapped one protected from the elements, tasted like bark when we opened it at home later.

Salted duck egg cakes
Like a sponge cake filled with cold, rich egg yolk. The version in Vũng Tàu tasted like cornbread. The version in Saigon randomly had some soft cheese under the yolk.

Stingray hot pot
I did my research about local specialties and walked into this restaurant asking for this dish in well-accented Vietnamese, which (naturally) made the waiter think I was at least halfway fluent. This was unfortunate, as the combination of my bad listening skills and his thick Southern accent made me unable to understand phrases as simple as ‘Where are you from?’ or ‘How long have you been here?’ Bemused, he left us alone after we tried hard to communicate, but not before instructing us to give the rays time to sit in the bubbling tom-yum-esque broth. Stingray is something I have had once before barbecued at a high-end restaurant in Denver, and I didn’t like it. Here, it was the same dark, meaty, white-fleshed fish, but went much better with the tangy soup and accompanying (of course) fish sauce to dip it in. The broth also contained okra, bamboo, the usual millions of leaves, taro stems, and banana blossoms.

Best city to get seafood:

Sorry, Saigon, but: Vũng Tàu. The aforementioned stingray hotpot, the fact that we were able to buy three fresh crabs off the street for $10 (and that was probably the tourist price), the bánh khọt with perfect firm shrimp dominating the rice cake, the unlisted grilled fish place we found on a deserted corner after driving around in circles looking for a pre-researched grilled fish place, where the owner told us he’d been open for only ten days.

Meal that was delicious and maddening in equal parts:

Lá Dong Riềng Restaurant offered turmeric grilled sturgeon for nearly $10, and I can’t recall ever having had sturgeon, so I thought I’d try it. What came out was a half-palm sized – total – four slices of sturgeon, brilliantly yellow and blackened crunchy with garlic. It was perhaps the most immediately gratifying thing I’ve ever put in my mouth, tasting like a perfect mix of chả cá Lã Vọng and my mom’s potato latkes. Five bites and it was over, leaving me raging for more but not wanting to blow $100 on sturgeon. I still kind of wish I had.

Breath of fresh air:

The vegetable pizza at the above-mentioned Victoria Hotel. This accompanied the stir fried Tonkin jasmine buds, and was in fact the reason we were there, having seen a promotional sign from the street promising a whole medium-sized pizza with eggplant, zucchini, carrots, real mozzarella, and all sorts of rare-for-Vietnam toppings for ‘just’ $4. The first menu they offered mentioned nothing about the promotion, and we felt almost bad about asking, given that we’d just been ‘monsieur’ and ‘madame’d to a white-tableclothed, scallop-napkinned table and served starter bread with pumpkin butter, but we decided to soften the blow by also ordering the jasmine buds and some wincingly expensive fruit juice. By the way, the pizza was big enough to feed both of us for dinner AND breakfast the next day.

Weirdest misunderstanding of vegetarianism:

The man in Đà Lạt who, when informed that my companion was a vegetarian, quickly swept the bowl of broth away, removed the two ground pork balls, and replaced it. Normally, the word ‘chay’ – a close translation of ‘vegan’ – is understood at least and revered at most.

Weirdest misunderstanding, period

In Hà Tiên, I ordered salty lemonade (chanh muối) from a couple ladies with a cooler sitting in front of their house. What I received was a small plastic baggie – maybe the size of two of my thumbs – filled with sweet vanilla yogurt (yaourt). Have any two sets of words sounded less alike?

Worst place to eat delicious, fresh, cheap, street crab

In your hotel room. Because even if the proprietess hands you a pestle to crack the carapaces and legs, and forks to dig the meat out, and plates for all this mess to land on, your hotel room will still smell like crab for the rest of your trip, even if you open the windows during a big lightning storm. However, this is your only choice should you choose to indulge in the pleasures of theVũng Tàu fish market, and you should, for this is where we saw the freshest seafood on offer in all of Vietnam. Still-wriggling multicolored shrimp tried to escape out of colanders filled with water as their vendor constantly recaptured them and threw them back in, at least 8 different varieties of crab were stacked with claws and bodies bound, snails bubbled in vats – not bubbled from being boiled, bubbled from breathing – and red snapper as big as my thigh lay piled with bright eyes on ice.

—

I may have enjoyed Vietnam, culinarily speaking, a tiny bit more when I ate meat more frequently and enthusiastically, but this trip allowed me to sample its vegan side, and I still believe that Vietnam would be a great country in which to be vegan. Aside from the beginning-and-middle lunar month days where lots of restaurants turn vegan, the dedicated vegan restaurants have multiple-page-long menus filled with 10 ways to cook eggplant, 25 salads, 50 ways to cook jackfruit, 100 ways to cook tofu, and, of course, perfect fake-meat replicas of all the meat dishes at surrounding restaurants. This makes American mainstays like Veggie Grill look like they’re just not trying.

Da Lat, Aside from Rain

I saw Da Lat mostly from underneath a curtain of rain. And not the usual bathwater-mist tropical spray that only serves to decrease the ratio of sweat to water on your body, but big droplets of freezing rain that felt like hail on a motorcycle. For the first two days, it had the decency to rain only after 2pm like a good rainy-season city, but after that, the starting time started creeping forward slowly until it was raining at 9:30am. While I paid good money and risked my life on a scooter to get soaked underneath several actual waterfalls in the area, it wasn’t the plan to ruin all my electronics and irreparably mildew-ify my shoes. So our last two days were spent mostly holing up and listening to thunder.

Before that happened, there was a nem nướng house. Actually, there were several, all on the same block, a phenomenon common to Vietnam, where the same types of food cluster and the restaurants copy each other’s names. But this nem nướng house, Nem Nướng Dũng Lộc, was the smallest of the group, the most crowded, and smelled the best, as it was 30% filled with one guy holding armfuls of nem on sticks and rotating the ones already on the grill. I don’t normally like nem nướng that much, probably because it’s the flagship dish at the only Vietnamese restaurant all the white people know about in my hometown, but the smell of grilling pork won me over. Also, the spread was impressive: nem, fried corn, daikon, carrots, cucumbers, pickled onions, and a heaping – and, we found, refillable – platter of fresh green mountain-grown leaves and chives. (The Mekong Delta had lots of vegetables too, but I found that they tended to be bitter, probably because they were grown near/in the floating garbage dumps known as the distributaries of the Mekong River. They may be the livelihood of a region, and they may be beautiful and muddy and picturesque, but I watched way too many people throw their household trash in them, pee in them, dump gasoline into them, and otherwise defile them to want to think too hard of eating out of it too.) Anyway, Da Lat’s sweet, fresh vegetables were a welcome change, and the ratio of vegetables to grilled meat was sufficiently high as to feel like I was eating a healthy salad (dipped in thick peanutty liver sauce, of course).

Another restaurant, whose sign lauded wonton noodle soup, whose tables were filled with wonton noodle soup, and whose name suggested you’d better at the least get noodles, had a menu about 6 pages long, but, obediently, I got the wonton noodle soup. It was a compact bowl covered with tough pork slices like papier-mache, but opened up to reveal excellent soft pork wontons and clearly homemade noodles. Just while I was sitting there – and I was eating fast that day so my vegetarian companion could eat soon too – the staff brought about 20 drawerfuls (yes, drawers – like in a chest of drawers) of fresh noodles in little rolls down from the third floor to keep up with demand.

A breakfast nook whose defining feature was two ladies with takoyako-like pans, squatting outside and deftly pressing two quail eggs together in pots to make mochi-sized cakes, served a plate of five such cakes that were unremarkable until dipped in the sweet, pork-ball-infused broth. When my companion notified the water he was a vegetarian, the waiter disappeared for about 2 seconds into the back with the broth, and returned with broth sans pork balls. Magically vegetarian!

The young waiter at one snail restaurant, which (like all good snail restaurants) had tanks full of the shellfish on offer at the front of their restaurant being sprayed with water periodically, handed us, straightfacedly, an English menu, a single sheet that consisted of beef, chicken, and seafood fried rice. I looked at him like he was crazy, which he was. “What about the snails?” I asked him, gesturing at the entire side wall of the restaurant. He looked at me blankly and pointed at the fried rice on the menu again. I finally had to ask for the Vietnamese menu, which listed all the snails by name with four options of preparation of each and was about 10 pages long. I wonder if tourists walk in there and actually think that fried rice is all the restaurant serves, and the snails are all for decoration. (The food was OK, but they overcook their large snails to rubber.)

One night was so wet that it was completely impossible to go out, so we made a dinner of yellow kiwi, avocado, jackfruit, orange, and the stuffed vacuum-packed squid I got at the Hakodate airport. The squid was underwhelming (as vacuum-packed squid should be) but Da Lat fruit, like Da Lat vegetables, is spectacular. Everything grows round and fat and juicy. Even the avocado, which I wasn’t expecting much out of because huge avocados tend to be watery, was almost a meat dish by itself. The hotel owner, watching this strange dinner theater, had no comments about the airport squid, but was scandalized by us daring to put salt on avocado (instead of blending it up with sugar and condensed milk to make a smoothie). He declined a sample.

Urban/Rural Expectations

As we hung over the railing of the bridge crossing the Bassac River, taking pictures of houses on stilts, temples on stilts, all kinds of boats tangled in the clumps of riverweeds that floated along with the current, and, of course, groups of men in boats taking pictures of us as we took pictures of them, a conical-hatted lady wandered past with a stick over her shoulder. In the basket on one side of the stick was a handful of baguettes; in the basket on the other side was a heaping pile of fermented shrimp sauce, spotted with little orange tails. This was so picturesque that neither of us reacted until she was the equivalent of half a block away. “Wait,” I said. “I actually really want that.” We chased her down, and she was all smiles, squatting right at the edge of traffic, throwing everything in her arsenal onto the sandwich: the paste, some pork belly and skins that came out of nowhere, the omnipresent pickled carrot and daikon, way more chilies than we needed. I ate it slowly for the next three hours, wondering how jellylike fermented shrimp could possibly taste cleaner and fresher than the snakehead fish I’d been eating ostensibly freshly pulled from the Mekong.

Rural Vietnam reverses my expectations about food and cities and rural areas: the provincial capitals and population centers serve up lackluster leftovers that taste like they were made from ingredients no one wanted at the local market. Overcooked, filmy-eyed mackerel, vegan Buddhist soup, spiced with a spoonful of MSG right in front of me, razor clams tasting vaguely of mold – and overall it’s all served with a scowl. But as soon as we get outside the city center and into the villages, ladies crouch by baskets of fish bright eyed and sometimes still gasping, old shacks vibrate with the aroma of freshly-baked bread and stuff their baguettes with head cheese, pork belly, and thick, chunky pate, tiny shops advertise fresh durian crepes, the mangoes are plentiful and cheap, and everyone’s all smiles and no English, ready to help anyway. If they’re drinking beer at 11am, as was a family of four whose house was separated from the river only by a handful of wooden beams and was only accessible by a bridge made of logs, they will thrust their hand out the door with a cold beer in it and demand that you take it. If you’re on the beach with them a few miles from the Cambodian border and they’re eating pork loaf, and sesame cake on a tarp while singing karaoke on a portable machine, you’d better get ready to eat pork loaf, and sesame cake too. And if you tell them you’re a vegetarian, they’ll have a nice green orange and a bunch of rambutan ready for you!

Saigon, Take Three

My third time in Saigon was lighter on the surprises, but was still satisfying, providing me with all the delicious grilled shellfish I remembered, consistently good random street food, and complete chaos in every other sense.

By memory I sought out Ốc Đào, down its maze of flooded alleys, and introduced my companion to grilled blood cockles with garlic, which were less bloody than some versions but retained their slick oystery tang. Their mussels were cooked only lightly so that they, too, felt more like oysters in the mouth than like mussels, but somehow my companion, who thinks the texture of oysters is disgusting, magically liked both. We both took a leap to new territory with some big, pointy, triangular snails – somewhere between conch and cockle – grilled in sweet fish sauce. The guys at the next table had all coincidentally gone to college in the U.S. and helped us pass the time after dinner, when it poured so hard it flooded the entrance to the restaurant to the depth of about a foot, and we all had to wait for the water level to go down before we could leave

After an arduous temple tour of District 1, there was an abandoned-looking cart with ‘Bánh Canh Cá Lóc’ splashed across the front. As I expressed my disappointment about the apparent abandonment, the old woman who was squatting on the sidewalk a couple doors down selling flowers and magazines yelled a few words, and a young woman appeared and ‘opened’ the cart for business so we could eat snakehead fish udon noodle soup adorned with a bunch of tiny quail eggs.

At night, around the circle surrounding Turtle Lake, vendors were dotted, all equidistant from one another, selling bánh tráng nướng, often translated as Vietnamese pizza, but more closely resembling a quesadilla. One spread a sheet of dry rice paper with an egg mixture, grilled it, coated it with a sauce made of green onions and dried shrimp, and sold it to me for 10,000 dong, handing it over folded in half and wrapped in old newspaper. It was so hot I had to hot-potato it between my hands until I had climbed all the way up to the top of the fountain.

Little crispy fish cake and shrimp bánh khọt from a Vũng Tàu style restaurant were dwarved by the enormous leaves of lettuce they came with, and overpowered by the sprigs of fresh tarragon that were so peppery I sneezed fish sauce all over the table – twice.

On the way to the Fine Arts Museum, there was a bowl of mì quảng that was filled largely – surprise! – with cartilaginous jellyfish limbs? Tentacles?.. and tiny river shrimp that tasted like mackerel.

Just in the next alley from our Airbnb was Liên Hương, one of those vegan medicinal restaurants that lists how each dish will benefit various bodily issues and diseases (sample menu item: “green bananas, oyster mushrooms, fried tofu cooked with lemongrass, curry powder, a good deal of perilla. Quite a balanced dish, little known, tasty, full, beneficial to both the diabetic and the cardiovascular”). We ordered that and a coconut palm bud braised in a clay pot, both of which tasted nothing like anything we’d had before to compare it to. Banana soup? It wasn’t thick. Oyster mushrooms? They weren’t grilled or meaty. And the coconut palm bud had the look of a rock but the texture of slow-and-long-simmered jackfruit (or even pork). To finish it off, we had “pineapple leaf pasta, red bean, and coconut milk juice”, which unlike everywhere else in Vietnam, did not come over-sugared. We both felt energetic and cleansed after this meal, and spent no more total than the regular sit-down restaurant window of 150,000-200,000 dong (US$7-9). I would have been perfectly happy eating at this restaurant every night we were there, but it so happens that 25 varieties of sea snails exist seemingly only in the place I was in for one week, so…

Review: Destination 3 (Dongbei)

China and I have a long-standing love-hate relationship.

At the end of the summer in 2013, when I compiled my top ten favorite meals from a trip through Japan, China, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Cambodia, I was surprised to find that four of them were from China. I forget how good the food can be when I’m distracted by how difficult China is to exist in on a day-to-day basis.

I’ve spent so many afternoons getting honked at by buses, pushed on the shoulder by crossing guards, jostled in front of by pretty much anyone joining a ‘line’, cigarette smoke blown in my face, spat in front of, told that an establishment does not in fact have what is printed on their menu or that it is actually twice as much as it states in print, only to end up, at the end of the day, eating local cold-water river fish lovingly stuffed with herbs and spit-grilled to perfection, or dumplings made with rare fungus and young leaves collected from the mountainside, or a zillion razor clams steamed in foil, for something under the equivalent of $2-3.

And then I can’t even go home and write about it, because the Chinese government blocks access to Google, Facebook, Blogger, WordPress, Reddit, YouTube, and many more websites that I didn’t know I found indispensable until they weren’t available anymore. For good measure, sometimes the internet just plain stops working altogether, or the people next door start having an earsplitting karaoke party.

So despite spending 75% of my time in China thoroughly annoyed, I keep coming back. And there’s another reason for that. The friend I travel with and visit in China is fluent in Mandarin, which opens up a whole new world to me in terms of access to things tourists don’t generally access, understand, or even know exist. I’ve eaten a variety of snails out of a paper cup in the shantytown district of Shanghai, listened to a blind masseuse thunder about socialism and visas as he elbows my kidneys and cracks my neck alarmingly, visited the North Korean border at Tianchi Lake in Changbaishan Nature Reserve (which required a bewildering number of train, bus and taxi transfers that could never have been deciphered in English), and been able to interrogate-by-proxy every street vendor whose wares are hidden in steamers or behind the counter rather than having to rely on what I can see (a-la-Taiwanese night markets). And while people in public will bodily shove you out of the way to enter a reserved-seats train one second earlier, I admit that the attitude of most once you’re actually in their house or business is brusque but accommodating, and eventually, curious. So I would gather I know more about Chinese food and culture than any other country I’ve visited, even though I still speak very little Mandarin, can only recognize a few characters, and never feel the pull to return to China once I’ve left.

Again, though, I keep doing it. During this two-week trip I visited the northeast (Dongbei) region, visiting Changchun, Yanji, and Baihe (the gateway town for Changbaishan). Changchun, the provincial capital, was my home base. Yanji is a majority-ethnic-Korean city near the North Korean border (apparently a very porous border as that border goes) and Baihe is basically a resort town built up to serve the hordes of tourists visiting Changbaishan (though, confusingly, they centered it over 30km away from the park).

I expected Baihe to taste like, well, a boring overpriced resort town, but actually I had three of my most interesting meals there, which was fitting given that this was also where I felt the resulting ‘earthquake’ of North Korea’s most recent nuclear test. Downstairs from our hotel, there was a restaurant who served, on two separate nights, a dumpling feast consisting of rare fungus dumplings and young, dark green mountain leaf dumplings, and a plate of small whole cold water river fish in spicy garlic-cilantro sauce. We enjoyed these new flavors (the former tasted like a Chinese medicine shop smells – in a good way) while listening to a couple scream at each other outside a convenience store across the street. I knew that I had failed to adequately suck the fish heads clean of meat when the waitress asked me, “Are you used to Chinese food?” which I know really meant “You eat that fish wrong!”

Yanji was a stop we were looking forward to, hoping to get some unique Korean food, but what we ended up with was naengmyon (cold noodle) soup with a random watermelon slice in it for dinner, and kimbap (Korean rolled sushi) slathered in pink mayonnaise for lunch the next day. Happily, once I wiped the Pepto-Bismol covering off, the roll was very good, stuffed with fish eggs and radish.

I had plenty of time in Changchun to explore, as well as a kitchen at home to cook with, but I am ashamed to report I used the kitchen for only one purpose: to hardboil duck, goose, and wild chicken eggs that I bought from what they call the bazaar. The egg lady’s wares were the first thing I saw in the massive stadium-like indoor market, and she seemed to have every kind of egg from every kind of bird in the region. She didn’t have an ostrich egg, but I also didn’t have 40 people to share it with, so that worked out fine. I learned after cooking them that goose eggs > duck eggs > wild chicken eggs >>>>> regular chicken eggs, mostly because of the high yolk-white ratio, which is unfortunate for me given that I spent years in Long Beach searching for duck eggs and finding nothing.

I heard that Changchun sources its seafood from North Korea, which is dubiously legal at best, but is a good explanation for why a very landlocked capital has so much shellfish on offer, from razor clams to cockroach-looking lobster hybrids to crayfish to tiny blue crabs to large red crabs to oysters. On two separate occasions, I bought heavy foil-wrapped packets bursting with razor clams and regular clams steamed in spicy red broth with accompanying glass noodles for between $2 and $3, and not one single clam was bad. They were all sweet and chewy with tender innards, and I ate so many at once that my mouth started to tingle (whether from a latent shellfish allergy that only emerges when I eat 50 clams or from the mala spice blend used, I’m not sure). I also tried a xiaokao place’s specialty roast fish, which came out on a scorching black platter and was an incredibly frustrating meal because the fish flesh was so sweet and flaky, and the skin so blackened and deep spiced, but the bones so numerous and tiny that they pricked me in the gums like little Novocaine needles while being too small for me to find and remove before they pricked me. I sucked that fish clean enough to avoid any passively judgmental comments by our waitress, though.

Another thing Changchun should not by rights have, but does anyway, is a wide array of fruit, including tropical fruit like mango, rambutan, durian, starfruit, and papaya. Every day for the last week I was here I would stop at the same mango juice stand and wonder why its room-temperature thick sweetness was so much better than mango juice in countries where mango-juice-vendors could literally reach up from their carts and pick mangoes from the trees.

Though my friend told me that Changchun normally has much more street food, and that many of the alleys and carts were closed for inspection, one alley did open on the last night and provide me with something I’d never seen before: a naan-adjacent blackened flatbread cooked stuck to the side of a kiln, lined before cooking with seaweed and pork. It crackled between the teeth more like papadam than like naan and was sweet for some reason, but not that sickly fake-buttery sweet many Asian bakeries slather on their bread and cakes. More like honey. And the lack of street food is less bothersome when many restaurants retain street-food-level pricing and cluster in open-doored rows along narrow streets, or create permanent stands in bazaars like the one featuring the egg lady. These close-enough-to-street-food establishments served me such interesting meals as bright orange carrot-infused wheat noodles with a thick mushroom dipping sauce, a hot, flaky fresh hamburger-sized pastry filled with ground pork and overflowing with very pickled sour vegetables, a miniature bright red numbing Sichuan-style hot pot with white fish and huge piles of potato, bamboo shoots, and leaves, garlic-topped grilled oysters, and durian pancake.

When we did go to fancier sit-down restaurants, it was usually to escape Chinese food and overpay for things like fig, goat cheese, and pine nut pizza, or bibimbap infused with cheese. I may pooh-pooh those things from the comfort and diversity of my home in the USA, but when my mouth burns from days of hot/numbing spice and endless oil, I will absolutely savor figs, pine nuts, and goat cheese, even if the pizza dough is lackluster by almost any standard. Also, what pizza place in the US would accompany their pizza with passionfruit-calamansi juice or a blueberry smoothie?

Today (well, yesterday: remember, Chinese firewall?), I board a plane to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, suitcase stuffed with dried strawberries and blueberries and freeze-dried figs (China is awesome at dried fruits, especially when it refrains from adding sugar). Ho Chi Minh City is one of my favorite places, food-wise, in the world, and I think I’ve eaten much of what it has to offer during my previous two trips, but this time I’m going to try and go further afield to the Mekong Delta and the Vietnamese-Cambodian border at Ha Tien and Chau Doc, as well as to Mui Ne and Da Lat. No matter what happens, I’ll make sure to eat lots of snails.

Review: Destination 2 (Taiwan)

If I skimmed the surface of Taiwan during my last trip, the best I can say is I skimmed it a little deeper this time. Save eating in large groups, going on a food tour, or joining a Taiwanese family, such is the plight of the tourist in Taiwan (or anywhere really, but for some reason I feel it especially strongly here [and in China], perhaps because of the prominence of family-style meals).

Or maybe I’m just making excuses for Taiwan, whose food I want to rave about unreservedly, but can’t.

Don’t misunderstand: there were some high points – gasps of surprise, lucky finds, and, of course, a steady stream of cooling and diverse fresh fruit juices. But Taiwan, to me, was more of an initial dazzler than something that kept me interested for the whole three weeks. (Let me stress: food-wise only! I’m still dreaming about what it’d be like to settle down on the Hawaii-esque East Coast with a scooter…)

New dishes/ingredients tried that I’d never tried before:

Eel noodle soup: This is a Tainan specialty, and can be easily picked out among the glass-fronted street stalls, because these display cases are filled with little (roughly finger-sized) deboned brown eels. They are stir-fried with onions and then, in my opinion, ruined, by throwing the whole thing in a sweet, viscous broth. I actually ate this twice because I thought the first broth was a mistake. Without the broth, the eels are delicious, with a firm texture unmarred by bones, and the second time I chose to rudely leave my bowl of broth on the table.

Milkfish soup and fried milkfish: I dedicated a whole entry to milkfish – it was that good. All hail the milkfish, especially the version that showed up on the street exactly when I needed a refreshing, fish-skin covered, gingery break from braised everything.

Scallop and algae dumplings: These lime-colored dumplings were filled with scallops and dry pork and dipped in a vinegary chili sauce. While very simple, these were perfect, and I wished I’d ordered two sets of these instead of hedging with a set of pork dumplings. Incidentally, I would not have been able to order these had a stranger in line not come to my rescue and showed me how to write in my order in Chinese. One of Taiwan’s many perks is its insanely friendly population, any one of whom will without hesitation buy your train ticket if the machine is giving you trouble, physically walk you to your (even very far) destination, hand you free food on the subway for no reason (really, it was a bag of dried mango), and most importantly for me, help you order in restaurants.

A mystery vegetable translated as ‘mountain cabbage’: Raw, it looked like a small, narrow head of cabbage whose leaves twisted into curlicues at the ends, and cooked, it was softened by a mildly fishy broth, studded with whole slivers of garlic, and coated in tiny translucent anchovies.

Yam leaves with pork sauce: Another soft-when-cooked leaf, somewhat like spinach except… fuzzier.

Yellow watermelon: A watermelon, but yellow, and crispier, like an Asian pear!

Custard apple: I tooted the custard apple’s horn (and the horn of the lady selling them in Taitung) in another entry, but you can think of it as a delicious grainy-pudding-textured sweet pear.

Taro leaf (I think)-wrapped native grain and breadfruit-pineapple sausage: These two require a backstory. We were walking back from a turn in the local park, dominated by twisted dead-looking trees, ponds filled with birds, and a coconut-shaped sun shelter, when we came upon a very culturally-exploitative-looking festival wherein a Chinese announcer introduced performers from one of Taiwan’s native ethnic groups one after another as the audience munched on mountains of grilled pork and drank from jugs of what looked like Tang. We attempted to observe this from afar, but were invited in, handed plates, and had our plates aggressively filled. Hidden under all the grilled pork were the two gems that make up the title of this bullet point. The first tasted like tangy Cream of Wheat; the second was much more interesting. Even as tired of pork as I was, the addition of sweet pineapple and just-plain-bizarre breadfruit (it tastes kind of like creamy banana bread) made me eat it enthusiastically, which was good, because all eyes were on us. I shouldn’t have been surprised, this being polite, generous Taiwan, but all the food and festivities were free. We enjoyed the traditional songs and dances, but wished they weren’t treated like carnival sideshows.

Guancai ban (coffin cake): This dish is much touted in Tainan, but it tastes like nothing more than the kind of pot pie served exclusively to people over 70 or under 7. It’s basically fat Wonderbread toast filled with a cream sauce spiced with one grain of pepper and one grain of salt, filled with soft spam-like meat and soggy carrots and peas. How this made its way in Taiwanese cuisine is a mystery to me. Had I eaten this in any other context, I would have hated it, but it was so different from everything I’d been eating that it was pretty refreshing.

Luffa with clams: Part of an ultimately disappointing experience at one of Tainan’s more lauded restaurants, the luffa had the texture of a sponge crossed with okra, and soaked up the verging-on-spoiled clam taste. Pass, although I’d give it another try at a different establishment.

Stinky tofu “fries”: This was my second time eating stinky tofu, and it was a decidedly less stinky experience. A nearby Spanish-speaking, durian-popsicle-selling vendor (long story) told me that street tofu has steadily become less stinky in Taiwan due to complaining neighbors of night markets. I find this disappointing. Much like blue cheese, the stinkier the better!

Abalone on a stick: I’m pretty sure I have had abalone before, but not grilled. This was the Kenting Night Market’s single saving grace.

Favorite meal:

Actually, I can do this for Taiwan. Hands down. It was the two dollar milkfish soup in Tainan. No frills to the bowl, no walls to the restaurant, just spirals and spirals of oily fish skin in gingery water.

Meal That Broke A Significant Streak

YongKang Beef Noodle soup. I hadn’t eaten beef for months (and in fact it’s been almost a full year since I’ve had a hamburger), but last time I went to Taiwan and failed to get beef noodle soup, I was mercilessly made fun of by Taiwanese expats and basically everyone who had visited Taiwan before. The implication was that I had totally wasted my trip. So: YongKang Beef Noodles. I ordered half tendon, half meat, and marveled at the well-marbled, fall-apart texture of the beef and the fact that the spice of the broth didn’t get tiresome. Part of the reason I don’t eat beef is that it can easily get shoe-leathery. This was more like clouds.

Ranking of Night Markets:

1. Raohe Street (Taipei)

I’ll rhapsodize about Raohe Street for a bit, but let me first describe what it was up against: I came here on my last night in Taiwan, when I had had it up to here with night markets. I was tired of the things on sticks, fried things, mysterious cauldrons of five-spiced things, the vague aroma of stinky tofu without the strong taste of stinky tofu, vendors lackadaisically yelling the names of their dishes over and over again while playing Candy Crush on their phones, and shoulder-to-shoulder sloooow shuffling. I didn’t want to eat anything created to be easily edible while walking. I didn’t want to see theatrical pouring of egg or tossing of waffle batter, or anything whipped or decorated into the shape/visage of a face.

Raohe Street, though, had substance. Not at one stand in its considerable length did I see anyone selling anything that would look better on Instagram than it would taste in your mouth. And it had variety! I saw things at Raohe Street I’d never seen at other night markets: stinky tofu ‘fries’ with kimchi, mulberry-hibiscus juice (served in baby bottles for some reason), guavas with punched holes for ice cream, pepper buns actually baked in giant, air-wavering kilns, cactus fruit juice, durian popsicles, and much more. I was sad that the famous pepper bun filled me up most of the way (and that it was my last night) so I couldn’t try more things.

2. Keelung Miaokou (Keelung)

The most organized and easily navigable market I have seen also offers a staggering variety of fresh seafood. I had sashimi in Kenting and was incredibly unimpressed, but here the sashimi is better despite being served out of a metal container on the street. You can get any kind of fish, clam, mussel, oyster, crab, lobster, etc., prepared any way you could possibly think of.

3. Ningxia (Taipei), Liouhe (Kaohsiung), Ziqiang (Kaohsiung), Shida (Taipei), and Taitung (Taitung). All of these – even Ningxia, which was unceremoniously knocked from its previous perch on the podium – blur into a haze of hawking and crowds. An honorable mention will go to a few for specialties: Ningxia for its egg yolk pastry and Taitung for its custard apple lady.

99. Kenting Street (Kenting)

I’ve covered how Kenting was very, very much Not About Food and will not rehash this here except to wonder aloud how it gets its throngs of seafood-searchers without actually having any good seafood on offer.

And While We’re on the Subject, a Note on Night Markets

When you travel to Taiwan, you mostly likely land in Taipei, which invites you to try one of its eight gazillion night markets. All eight gazillion of them are stuffed with people and flashy stands that make it so easy for you to point and choose without speaking a lick of Mandarin. You gorge yourself on things that would be prohibitively expensive in the US, like abalone, scallops on sticks, or oyster pancakes, or things that seem new and exciting, like stinky tofu or grilled spice-dusted whole squid, or things that are at the head of inexplicably long lines, like pepper buns or banana pancakes, and get high on the whole new, heady, overwhelming experience. But then you wake up after a week and wonder, are there any vegetables in the world that aren’t braised, pickled, or drowned in pork fat? Are there any spices other than salt, red pepper, or MSG? Will I ever eat food prepared with care rather than thrown together on a 2×2 plank at the moment I order it?

Best Dessert

There was fierce competition for this category, as Taiwan loves it some sweets, and will take any excuse to stuff something with whipped cream, encrust it in sugar, turn it into ice cream, wrap a waffle around it, drizzle it over a pile of ‘snow’, encase it in a ‘sandwich’ made of cookies, or throw it in a cup with sweet tofu. The winner did not have to do any of those things. It wasn’t a reach. It was a simple cone of strong Earl Grey ice cream (in Tainan across from the Grand Mazu Temple).

—

After looking wistfully at Raohe Street Night Market’s offerings with a totally full belly, I got a good night’s sleep, tried to visit a closed art museum, got my feet mercilessly beaten up by a masseuse, lost the code to my coin locker at the Taipei Main Station and therefore would have lost my suitcase if it weren’t for the nice staff at the TRA booth, and got on a plane to Changchun, China, where I will be sampling illegally imported North Korean seafood, among other things to be announced by my gracious host.

Not About Food

Kenting was not about food.

Within 15 minutes walk from my definition-of-touristy, choked-with-scooter-hawkers hotel, all the noise fell away – all the people must have been swallowed up by their tour buses – and a mysterious gate appeared at the entrance to something called ‘Frog Rock’. The man at the gate seemed surprised that anyone was going to Frog Rock, but he dutifully woke up from his nap to take my NT$30. I walked down the deserted street, past a bunch of sea-battered, white-walled, temple-roofed buildings, past a sign that announced I would soon be seeing a giant rock in the shape of a frog, through a natural tunnel made of pockmarked black volcanic rock, and into a landscape which, while it had nothing to do with rocks shaped like frogs, had everything to do with being seismically terrifying.

It was immediately apparent, even though my experience with geology consists solely of sleeping through a summer class in college, that this area had once – even recently – been a seething, roiling mass of lava. Porous black rocks, looking like sponges from a distance but feeling like coral on the feet, lay scattered and tumbled into the turquoise water, each pore home to a family of crabs and a starfish or two. They rose dramatically away on the cliff side and stood twisted as though they’d just been tossed there by a violent flow. And the sand made a constant clicking sound that seemed mechanical at first, but then it became clear that this was because the sand was virtually made of hermit crabs. Ranging in size from a quarter of a pinky nail to a palm and clad in every kind of shell or shell fragment, they scurried forward, backward, and sideways, fell at me from rocks and trees, and tried to become briefly motionless upon being picked up, only to forget their fear in five seconds and emerge to pinch at my fingers.

I spent hours here, listening to the sea glug at the pores on the rocks like a thousand little suction cups, emerging in time to go to the famous Kenting Night Market and purchase an overpriced, tough giant squid leg and some mushy grilled scallops with an MSG-heavy powder dusting, and ostensibly to cheer myself up after that, some dumplings that were advertised as shrimp but were made of gristly five-spiced pork and a syrupy sauce so cloying I threw the whole thing away.

The next day, I rented freedom in the form of an engine-knocking little scooter and scooted from white-sand beach to black-sand beach, watching tourists buy jet-ski rides from the locals and shriek through the layers of water color, which ranged from golden green at the shore to navy at the horizon, with some surprising stripes along the way. I waded, but didn’t swim, as the waves crashed right on the shore with a violence that sent splashes twice the height of my head. For lunch, I stopped at Houbiho Harbor, famous for its sashimi, to purchase a NT$300 plate of assorted sashimi, sliced such that the connective tissue got caught in my teeth and the skin retained a bunch of little hard nubs, and tasting essentially like fishy air. Missing Hokkaido’s seafood like crazy, I scooted up a mountain into the National Recreation Area, which was ten degrees cooler than the coast and gave me a 360 degree view of the peninsula, which was wreathed in clouds which were magically not raining, only providing shade.

So, Kenting was not about food.

The Milkfish Country

Hakodate may have the Squid Dance, but Tainan has the Milkfish Palace.

As I made my way downstairs from the (entirely in Chinese, but sufficiently picture-adorned to be amusing) museum display about the history, lore, and usage of the milkfish, the girls manning the milkfish-snack-sampling stands all started elbowing each other to see who was going to have to go try and speak English to the foreigner while handing her a seaweed and milkfish cookie.

The winner(/loser?) approached me with her cookie on a stick and said enthusiastically, “It’s a cookie made from milkfish!”

“I ate milkfish this morning,” I told her as I took the cookie (which was very strange – much stranger than the shrimp cookies on offer everywhere else). And I had. I ate something called ‘Milkfish Skin Soup’ from a standon a street just outside the Anping District which has been serving this soup as breakfast for years. The skin curls in the bowl like shavings from the skin of a very large vegetable, shiny like an onion but spiraled like a snail. Enough meat is left on that it retains the chew of a salmon, and the flavor of a salmon-mackerel hybrid. The broth is almost clear, but the bottom is littered with reedy ginger stalks, making the last few bites spicy.

I also had milkfish at a much fancier place on YongKang street in Taipei a little over a week ago as part of a feast that included a mysterious curly-leafed cabbage and an omelet that looked like a pot pie. This milkfish was pared to the belly, laid flat, and fried, accompanied only by lemon and white pepper. The wide stripe of fat running between the halves served as a decadent dipping sauce for the meat. Much richer than butter, it was inedible alone, kind of like a savory coconut cream.

As obsessed as Taiwan is with the milkfish – and it is, as you can’t turn around without seeing a milkfish body part on a menu – apparently it is the Philippine’s national fish, so that’s one country I can’t skip!

Custard Apples and the Capital of Food

It’s been tough, culinarily speaking, for the past week or so, being on the relatively rural East Coast of Taiwan. Non-culinarily-speaking, of course, it’s been wonderful. I spent 80 miles with my butt on a scooter, surrounded 360 degrees around with expansive ocean views, carpeted with palm trees, anchored by endless mountains. Puffy clouds stuck to the mountains like glue, never quite making it over to cover the sun that was slowly cooking me alive. To escape it, I ‘had’ to take a random side path in the general direction of the ocean, hoping to find a swimmable beach. I found a secluded cove sparsely spotted with students of a Taiwanese surfing class, with black volcanic sand and regular, rolling, body-surfable waves. Standing ankle deep in the water, spooning the insides out of a smooth-yet-gritty custard apple and spitting the seeds into the waves, I considered aborting my circumnavigation of Taiwan right there and just planting in Dulan for the remainder of my week and a half. Instead, after the custard apple had gone, we continued up the coast to Yuli and back down the East Rift Valley to search out an indigenous restaurant that first turned us away for not having reservations, and then, upon seeing how burnt and exhausted we were, squeezed us into a table with strangers and served us a set meal (that, unfortunately, was so salty my tastebuds died for a full day afterward, but the pleasure here was in the journey).

Taitung itself’s saving grace, as advertised, was the plentiful and cheap fruit, particularly the aforementioned custard apple. I bought exclusively from a lady who took it upon herself to crack the top off the first custard apple of my life and scooped out the first spoonful for me. (At least, I told her it was my first custard apple. I’ve had soursop, which a perfunctory Google search tells me is the same thing, but if it is, the version is Taitung is so much better as to be effectively a different species.) As for the rest of the food, I should have just stuck with whatever was pulled out of the sea that day, because my best meal there was a single, palm-sized grilled whole fish served with lemon and salt.

I’m in Tainan now, though, where I essentially fell out of my hotel’s sliding glass doors and into a famous bowl of noodles with black vinegar and shrimp broth. Served with saucy pork-topped sauteed yam leaves, both dishes were aggressively garlicky, but other than that, mild and understated enough to stand the test of a leisurely half-hour lunch. And coming out THAT door, I was bombarded with dessert shops (Hokkaido-style cheesecake, cupcakes, soft serve, gelato, milk tea ice cream…) juice bars (with ingredients from dragonfruit to osmanthus to kiwi), smoking grills full of skewers, and all manner of whole, chopped, raw, grilled, boiled, and/or souped seafood. Keep in mind too that this was 3:00pm, a time when most Taiwanese in other cities are deep into midafternoon heat-induced siesta time and all their restaurants are shuttered.

So I’m guessing Tainan will be as overwhelming to my tastebuds as the East Coast scenery was to my eyes.

Drawn Fruit and Real Fruit

I am passing a pineapple bun bakery at the same time as the sky opens up to let out all of its rain. This is lucky for a number of reasons: one, rain hasn’t sullied Taipei’s triple-digit temperatures all week; two, this pineapple bun bakery has had a line every time I’ve walked by it and is deserted now; and three, the bakery has an awning. Serendipity.

I order a bun with butter inside, entirely out of character as I have had less than tasty experiences with pastries in East Asia unexpectedly being full of butter, like butter is a reasonable substitute for whipped cream or custard (it isn’t). But I order it here because it is what the bakery is known for, and far be it from me to turn my back on trying something that hundreds of Shida University students buy bags and bags of every day after class. Even if pineapple buns don’t have any pineapple in them and are so named only for the design on the top of the bread. Even then.

I find upon ordering that I am actually lucky for four reasons, and the fourth is that they’re just pulling a tray of freshly baked buns out of the oven. I get mine and it’s too hot to touch, so I first dangle it by a pinky, then toss it from hand to mouth to hand as I dash the few blocks home.

Oddly, the experience of eating it is heavily atmosphere-dependent. I’m a well-documented taste hardliner, maintaining a laser focus on the objective taste of the food to the exclusion of everything else: if the dish is good, it’s good, period, whether I’m indoors or outdoors, on a plastic stool or a lavish lounge chair or standing at a counter, whether it’s dinnertime or lunchtime, whether I’m melting in the heat or shivering with my hands around a mug of tea.

In the case of this pineapple bun, though, the crunch of the topping may give a sweet contrast to the soft rest of it, but I am well aware that if the cold hard butter didn’t give relief to the soft, fiercely hot bread, exactly mirroring the way the cold, sharp rain gave relief to the fiercely hot, sunny day, I wouldn’t have enjoyed it nearly as much.

I try hard, in Taroko National Park, to find food that is decent, but failing that, to at least find food that has some qualities that mirror the staggering, photographically uncapturable scale of the precipitous mountains, marble-walled and grotto-pocked gorges, and rushing, deafening slate river, but I can’t, so I allow the food to fade into the background, eating (I assume) like those mysterious creatures who claim they ‘eat to live, not live to eat’. Dumplings, noodle bowls, stir fried vegetables over rice, repeat.

The sole exception to this vacation from foodie-hood is fruit, particularly the peaches and plums sold at the highest bus stop in Taroko (Tienxiang). Women ply the bus stop, fruit in one hand, knife in the other. Without looking down, they cut slices from the fruit and offer them to everyone getting off the bus. The line of people exiting the bus then curves to the right as every single passenger, shocked by the explosive juiciness and flavor of this slice, joins a new line, this time to buy fruit. The fact that the price exceeds US farmers market prices matters not.

I also feast on guava and yellow watermelon slices for breakfast, free from the hostel, and while on the first day I’m savoring every juicy bite, by the third day I feel like it’s entirely normal (yet still wonderful) to wake up and fill up on abundant tropical fruit that just appears on my plate. The bar is set higher now for Taitung to wow me with its famous custard apple (and durian and starfruit and pomelo and real pineapples)!

Righting Night Market Wrongs

I admitted in this entry that I didn’t do Taiwan quite right the last time I was here (November 2015). I was overreliant on night markets because of how seductively simple it was to just be able to point at what I wanted, rather than use my nonexistent Mandarin. I ended the entry with a promise to return with a Chinese speaker, and here I am!

My first mission was to right a non language-related wrong, where I accidentally got full off a single cheese-stuffed whelk before getting to try a delicious-looking fried oyster dumpling at the Ningxia Night Market. The night market looked precisely the same as I remembered it, down to the exact location of the food vendors. A long line snaked around the corner from the entrance, full of people excited to get some kind of new burrito-looking thing, but other than that, I was able to find the oyster dumpling stand (and a deep fried taro/preserved egg yolk ball place that I needed to visit again) practically with my eyes closed.

The oyster dumpling was stuffed full of oysters, egg, and marinated mushrooms, then deep-fried to form a little baggie with a fried bow at the top to hold as I dug in, like XLB filled with oysters instead of soup. There definitely could have been more oysters in my dumpling, but it was savory and surprisingly, spicy! I preferred it to the famous Taiwanese oyster omelet, which in my opinion is ruined by the weird sweet tomato sauce they pour over them.

My second mission was to return to the seafood-famous Keeling Miaokou Night Market, which I visited in 2015 carsick from a long bus trip and only able to eat a small cup of deep fried tiny crabs and some squid guts over rice. This time, I arrived ravenous from hiking at Yehliou GeoPark, went to one of the incomprehensible seafood stands that had waylaid me before (it’s a stand full of a million types of seafood on ice!), and ordered (well, my companion ordered for me) stir-fried blue crab in butter sauce. Surprisingly, it came with TWO crabs, neatly chopped into pieces and pre-cracked for easy meat-digging. It was studded with thick, unapologetic garlic slices, ribboned with egg, and had a fiercely savory buttery deep fried coating on the crab shells. One crab was female, and had roe. Both had especially delicious guts. I’m really more of a crab body eater than a crab leg eater, and this dish was made for me. At NT$550 it was also the most expensive meal I’ve ever had in Taiwan. But paying the equivalent of about US$18 is absolutely worth not regretting wasting the true seafood night market experience again!

The next step is to eat in some actual restaurants that have only Chinese menus. I imagine this will become more a necessity than a desire as I start heading south and east.

Review: Destination 1 (Hokkaido)

In transit to my next destination, Taiwan, I reflect upon my 16 days in Hokkaido.

New dishes/ingredients tried that I’d never tried before:

Haskap berries: I couldn’t find them fresh, only partially frozen and ice-encrusted in the too-cold refrigerator section of the souvenir shop at the Otaru JR station. They were tongue-buzzingly sour and only palatable spread on a croissant.

Hairy crab: This is the food I kicked myself for nearly a year for failing to try in Hong Kong. I would have failed here in Hokkaido as well – you seem to need a deep-pocketed entourage for a hairy crab feast, and all I have is a staunch vegetarian – except that on my last day in Hakodate, I was thrilled to randomly find a giant pre-cracked hairy crab leg and half-body submerged in my miso soup, which was itself an accompaniment to:

Fresh squid sashimi: While I have had squid sashimi before, I’ve always dismissed it as flavorless rubber bands. Cut directly from a squid that was swimming around seconds before, it’s more like flavorless tacky jello strands. Oh well. I tried.

Squid ink ice cream: Sinisterly pitch black ice cream that tastes like… cream. Perhaps squid just doesn’t have any taste at all? But lest you think maybe I’m just biased against squid…

Squid liver: As you may gather from this entry, squid liver is a winner, along with every other type of liver I’ve ever eaten.

Squid crackers and sea urchin crackers: These are a mainstay on shelves in souvenir shops, and are actually delicious, and yes, do actually contain squid and sea urchin as a significant portion of the ingredients. No, I don’t know how they don’t go bad. They have the texture of slightly thicker versions of those baked potato chips that cornered the ‘healthy chip’ market back when people were still scared of fried food.

Iwashi (sardine sashimi): Sardines are amazing as sushi. So soft and silky and yielding. Why they’re pooh-poohed as lower-class fish is utterly beyond me.

Yubari melon: Furano is famous for these melons, and I ate one with the aromas of melon and lavender mingling in the air, drifting over from the farms in which they were grown.

Wasabi sorbet: This was pressed upon me by the sweetest pair of Japanese (but English-speaking) tourists from Yokohama who happened to sit next to me at a fancy traditional sushi bar and keep me from making a fool out of myself. They were shocked to find that Americans use the terms ‘wasabi’ and ‘horseradish’ more or less interchangably, and wanted me to have this sorbet to prove once and for all that they’re different. I mean, who would eat horseradish sorbet? It was mild, vegetably, and more tangy than spicy.

Japanese-style cheesecake: More of a suggestion of a cake than an actual physical cake, these airy half-palm-sized cakes evaporate into a light cream the instant they come in contact with your tongue.

Favorite meal: Ha ha, this is not a remotely answerable question. Let’s try these:

Best uni (sea urchin): Let me preface this by saying that I will probably refrain from eating uni in the U.S. from now on. After having better uni than fancy-U.S.-restaurant uni as a) a flavoring on a gift shop cracker, and b) from a grocery store deli case, I am now irreversibly spoiled and choose to wait until my next Japan trip. Anyway, I picture the taste of uni on a spectrum from iodine-y or bitter (bad) to briny and oysteresque or sweet (good). The best briny uni was either at Uni Murakami, the formerly Michelin-starred eatery at Hakodate’s Morning Market, or at Sushi Dokoro Kihara in Yunokawa, and the best sweet uni was either at the Jiyuichi Market in Hakodate or at Sakanaya no Daidokoro in Sapporo. So yes, basically I’m saying that almost every uni I tried was awesome – just awesome in different ways.

Also, my dad requested that I title a blog post “Searchin’ for the Urchin”. Since I don’t plan to do an entire post on uni, please consider that the title of my last paragraph.

Best ramen: Full disclosure: I’m not a ramen girl. But each Hokkaido city I’ve visited lays claim to mastering one of the three major types of ramen, so it’d be silly not to pit them against each other. Asahikawa owns shoyu (soy), Sapporo owns miso, and Hakodate owns shio (salt).

Keeping in mind I only sampled one restaurant in each city, the winner is pretty easy: Sapporo. Ramen Shingen’srich, salty, murky red broth, snappy noodles, and thin-sliced, fully-half-fat pork was thoroughly enjoyable all the way to the last sip, and could only have been improved with an egg, which was my fault for not adding on. I cheated a little at Mizuno in Asahikawa by ordering ginger shoyu ramen instead of plain shoyu ramen, but I really don’t like shoyu ramen and wanted to give it at least a chance to be palatable. And it was: spicy with ginger shreds and full of tender bamboo and skinny noodles. Hakodate’s Ramen Ajisai comes in a distant third with ramen that tastes like chicken broth and is topped with still-cold deli-turkey-esque ‘chashu’. Better stick to squid, Hakodate. (No doubt they serve squid ramen somewhere.)

Most Unexpectedly Amazing Meal: Toyako Onsen may have overlooked a breathtakingly beautiful misty volcanic lake, but it barely had any food options (I ate dinner at 7-11 the second night, after some nightmarish takoyaki the first one). However, when we biked around Lake Toya’s perimeter, a surprisingly difficult (but of course picturesque and worth it) 22 mile slog, we discovered that the town on the opposite end of the lake featured a visitor centre with outstanding bukkake udon made with thickly marinated mushrooms, tempura crumbles, green onions, nori, and a fresh raw egg cracked over it all. Let me repeat: a visitor centre. In a touristy town. With no obligation or impetus to have good food. This simple noodle dish was so carefully portioned and divided and every ingredient tasted like it had just been picked, laid, sliced, or fried.

Meal At Which I Was Most Out Of My Element: I accidentally chose a really fancy traditional sushi bar for lunch in Yunokawa where only about 9 patrons were let in at once to sit in a semicircle around three sushi chefs who dedicated themselves exclusively – up close and personal – to 3 patrons each. Since everything was omakase, it didn’t matter that I couldn’t order, but there was a certain amount of risk in not being able to fit nigiri into my mouth whole, dipping the nigiri wrong and the rice falling apart, getting full before the courses were finished, being served octopus, etc. Luckily, the English-speaking couple from Yokohama was there, and I copied everything they did, sighing with relief whenever they did something imperfect to mask my own imperfections. I was rewarded with excellent uni (of course – de rigeur by now), a long skinny shell-less crab leg topped by organy tasting roe, two different cuts of tuna, scallop, and crunchy herring roe with the texture of baby corn. And the wasabi sorbet, of course.

Most Un-Japanese Meal: Surprisingly, NOT the Indian thali I had after overdosing on seafood bowls. The winner of this category goes to a woodsy cabin in Furano serving curry rice that had rude, confrontational signs all along its outer walls with unfollowable rules about how to behave. They were very firm about customers finishing their plates, admonishing foreigners (and only foreigners; the signs all began ‘Dear foreigners’) to only order what they could finish. I ordered the smallest possible menu item, and it was gigantic. While this totally un-Japanese frustation annoyed me, I have to admit that their homemade sausage curry rice was the best curry I’ve ever tasted. Spicy and complex, it bore no resemblance to any chain or boxed variety.

And I got full before the plate was empty, and I left, and there was nothing they could do about it.

The Breath of Fresh Air: I love seafood, of course, and I estimate I ate it every single day on this trip. But sometimes I longer for a vegetarian interlude, and Rojiura Curry Samurai in Sapporo provided the best of these rare interludes with a curry claiming to be made with 20 seasonal vegetables. When it arrived, every single one of these 20 vegetables was outlined in relief, from lotus root to cassava to carrot to chestnut. I ordered my curry cut with soy milk to balance the spicy tomato base, and accompanied by a yuzu lassi. Japanese-Indian fusion can be a little watered down, but this was anything but.

—

When my plane touches down in Taipei, Taiwan, I’ll take my vacuum-packed ika-meshi (rice-stuffed squid) that I bought at the airport, save it for a special occasion when I feel like remembering Japan, and otherwise shift gears. My culinary wish list in Taiwan includes: guancai ban, yam leaves with pork, shimu yu (milkfish soup), fried milkfish, luffa with clam, shachang fish (raw barracuda), mua gui, eel noodle soup, danzaimian, seafood congee, starfruit, durian, pomelo, custard apple, and Taitung sticky rice. Onward!

The Squid City

I’m at a street festival in a city known as the Squid City, and within the hour the citizenry will be enthusiastically performing the Ika Odori (translation: Squid Dance), a lively dance dedicated entirely to squid, at nearly every street corner in the city.

But none of the food stands at this street festival are serving squid.

They’re serving fried chicken. They’re serving okonomiyaki. They’re serving a staggering array of greyish-looking meats on sticks. And of course, they’re serving bananas coated in chocolate and decorated with candy to look like cute cartoon characters. But not squid. No squid anywhere.

This has been my experience all day. Okay, there’s squid at the Asaichi Morning Market, but much of it is served as a ‘dancing’ dish (confoundingly ALSO named Ika Odori) where the squid’s head is chopped off and its muscles contract in a morbid ‘dance’ as soy sauce is poured over it, usually accompanied by wide-eyed, madly Instagramming tourists, and I’m super not into that.

And, okay, there’s squid in most seafood restaurants, but as sashimi it’s too chewy for me. I certainly don’t want a repeat of that sashimi restaurant in Asahikawa where I lost all the face in the world by unsuccessfully covering up my unchewable octopus with an insufficient pile of daikon radish.

I just want some casual, cooked squid. Straight-up grilled. As tempura. Legs akimbo in a pile of soba noodles. Even on a stick, spiced so aggressively I choke on it (this happened in Hunan, China).

It takes me all day to finally find it, after many false starts, including being refused seating at an outdoor restaurant for not wanting to order alcohol. It’s in an alley paralleling the festival called Daimon Yokocho, and has no recognizable name, but on its window is taped a picture of a grilled, sauced squid sliced into perfect strips like a big fat squid-shaped piano.

I order the version with liver and organs intact, and wait. It comes out bigger than expected, perhaps three-quarters the length of a forearm. Its triangle-shaped head’s angles are curled and crispy from the grill, and it lies in a pool of liver-tinged sauce. It’s cut into rings, as in the picture, but since I ordered it with organs, it looks like it’s stuffed with paté. Ankimo (monkfish liver) is one of my favorite dishes to order in sushi restaurants, and this is like ordering two plates of it served inside a squid.

Some of its other organs taste and feel to-the-note like miniature mussels. Maybe they are. Maybe Hakodate stuffs their grilled squid with mini mussels. Maybe they FEED their squid de-shelled mussels. I don’t know how Japan works, or how squid works, or how any of this works, but I know I like this squid and I like its organs. I wish some of my paté-loving relatives could try this, in the same way I wish they would try balut, which also tastes a bit like paté. A liver is a liver is a liver, even if it’s a squid liver, a monkfish liver, or a fetal duck liver.

Full, pondering squids and livers, I wander back to the street festival, where a crowd has gathered around a Hakodate-Singapore Friendship Float, all ready to dance the Ika Odori. We’re all dancing the Squid Dance, but I might be the only one dancing the Squid Dance literally full of squid.

Easily Found Food

In foreign countries, there are lots of ways to fail at finding and eating the food you have so carefully researched ahead of time.

Vietnam specializes in the unauthorized duplication of famous stalls, presenting you with the quandary, for example, of three seemingly identical banh xeo stands facing each other across an alley. Korea likes to write its menus in a loopy, highly stylized script on wooden planks deep inside the dining room, where it would be exceedingly awkward to stand for minutes with face buried in Google Translate. China likes to run out of whatever the restaurant specializes in right as you arrive, even if you arrive at 6am. Malaysia goes a simpler route and just makes it impossible to walk anywhere.

Hokkaido, however, has taken all my memories of frustrated, fruitless city-wandering and shoves them aside. All restaurants are where they say they are, and if they don’t have lacquered replicas of their dishes in display cases outside, they have colorful posters, and if they don’t have colorful posters, they have a waiter willing to parse my halting hiragana-reading.

Unagi Kamogawa is wallpapered around the outer door with shiny but simple images of eel. Eel in round bowls and eel in square bowls – that’s it. I step into a den thick with eelsmoke, take off my shoes, and practically trip down into the space beneath the squatting table. A customer with one protruding bottom tooth and slow but confident English tells me he only eats eel once a month because it’s so expensive. It is – my round bowl is ¥2200 – but the two thick fillets are more smoky and tender than sweet and cloying, have only tiny flexible little bones that yield easily to my swallowing, and come with pickled vegetables and a clear soup featuring a mystery spring-onion-looking thing that tastes a little like a fish cake.

Sapporo’s Nijo market solves my ever-present problem at seafood markets: seeing all this delicious seafood but being unable to do anything with a giant horsehair crab or tank of abalone in my hostel/Airbnb. Next to the tanks of waving tentacles and claws and bubbling shells, there are restaurants, and the restaurants will put any combination of the market’s wares in a rice bowl for you. Again, it’s pricey, but ¥3800 gets me a sea urchin/salmon/salmon roe kaisen-don accompanied by a bowl of miso soup with, no exaggeration, half a crab tilted out of the side as if to mount a too-late escape attempt. The urchin is so soft and indistinct that it looks like scrambled eggs, usually bad news for a creature that gets runnier the longer it’s out of its shell, but it’s so mild and sweet that perhaps even avowed uni-haters would reconsider. It stains the rice under it sun-yellow, a welcome leftover after disappearing so quickly.

Oddly, the urchin here is better than in Otaru, the port where they actually capture them. Otaru’s kaisen-donlets me sample two different species of urchin, the northern variety and the short-spined variety, and while both are firm-edged, their flavor is tinged with iodine, and one’s color is somewhat greenish. Both would be laudable in a US sushi bar, but compared to Sapporo’s scrambled-eggy urchin, they pale. The winner in the Otaru bowl is the giant mound of crab meat next to it, taking up fully half the bowl and remaining sweet and stringily flavorful to the last mouthful. I always feel weirdly decadent eating chopstickfuls of crab meat, knowing the work it takes to extract just one strand from a shell, and as if to underline my uneasiness, they place a crab claw across the bowl with half the shell cleanly removed to reveal a perfect, untouched, still-claw-shaped wall of meat, ripe for the taking.

But one can’t always spend $30 on unagi or kaisen-don, and this is where Japan’s unsung heroes step in: train station restaurants. They always have English-speaking workers, and JR Sapporo Station is so much more than a train station, so it may be unfair to call its food train station food, but still: it’s a mall – actually three malls – two subway stations, and an underground tunnel to ensure continued commerce even during Hokkaido’s long winters. And it provides me with:

– legitimately excellent soba (studded with melt-in-your-mouth shrimp tempura and a tidy pile of tamago)

– airily-breaded tonkatsu surrounded by stuffed eggplant and shrimp, accompanied by mustard greens and silky chawanmushi

– a bowl filled with big chunks of soft tuna, bright green avocado, and that slimy white mass known as mountain yam that I usually hate, but that somehow ends up blended with rice to make a sticky-rice-like concoction, accompanied by gorgeously silky black sesame ice cream splashed with matcha ice.

Asahikawa Station, for its part, though only attached to a mere one mall, has a version of takoyaki that is perfectly cooked, incorporates greens into its batter and comes with a sour, zingy yuzu sauce. I pair it with a sugar-dusted green tea custard-filled taiyaki from a few stalls down.

While Japan may be lacking in the thrill of the chase, and therefore in providing me with the satisfaction that comes after having successfully chased a food item down, it’s kind of nice sometimes to just be able to decide what I want to eat, set off on an organized, efficient public transit system, and eat it!

The Octopus Dilemma

She comes out carrying a long, square, boat-shaped platter piled high with six different types of sashimi. This is exactly what I meant to order, which is a miracle considering I had to try to explain in Japanese that I wanted sashimi from Hokkaido only.

With the aid of a bilingual fish info sheet she procured from some hidden closet, we confirm that what is in front of me is, from left to right: hirame (flatfish), tako (octopus), hokkigai (surf clam), hotate (scallop), amaebi (raw shrimp), and iwashi (sardine). With a bow, she withdraws, though I can see her hovering in the corner in an area she might think is just out of my sightline. She is extremely anxious to please, which I find heartwarming considering I entered her establishment alone with terrible Japanese skills in a tank top and wide-leg pajama-esque pants to take up the only non-tatami four-top in the restaurant.

At first, there’s no problem with being attentively spied upon, since the iwashi are tiny maroon-striped fatty oily wonders coupled with ginger and green onions that make me wonder why we ever bother to cook, pickle, or jar them, and the amaebi, tiny tender little pink fingers, make me forget every negative word I’ve ever said about raw shrimp having the texture of dried glue.

I get nervous as I get closer to the octopus, though. Octopus served as sashimi is almost always inedible for me, and not because I don’t like it the taste. In fact, the soft white rubber banded fat around the tentacles of this version is plump, oceany, and delicious. What I mean is that I literally cannot eat it, because my front teeth are incapable of tearing off a piece, and my molars are incapable of crushing it.

Sadly, this turns out to be the case here. The only way I’m going to be able to eat this octopus, I know, is if I tear at it with my paws like a bear at salmon, suck the fatty tentacled area off with a big slurp and leave the rest, or choke to death trying to fit a whole piece in my mouth at once. So I know I’ve got to find some other way of getting rid of it.

I’ve been faced with this dilemma at sushi bars before. I have a vivid memory, for example, of sliding a piece of slimy, rank uni (sea urchin) nigiri slowly off the bar and into a napkin-lined jacket pocket, permanently imbuing the pocket with the smell of iodine, just so the chef wouldn’t know I didn’t eat it.

But there are no pockets in my pajama-like pants to slide the octopus into, and even if there were, I’m being watched closely enough that this isn’t an option. So I eat the rest of the platter with obvious appreciative gestures, which isn’t difficult given that everything else is excellent, and as I chopstick up various pieces of fish flesh, I nudge the pile of shredded daikon and onions ever closer to the pile of octopus. With each bite that travels to my mouth, the pile of vegetables overtakes the pile of octopus, until, at last, my tastebuds are vibrating with the last rich sardine (please make it a point to try sardine sashimi, everyone, really), and the octopus is very superficially covered.

I linger for awhile with my green tea, but realize that I’d better get up and pay at the counter so she doesn’t come over and look at my platter while asking how everything is, so I do that, and after I pay (a bit of a shock at ¥3200), she delivers a mouthful, a couple sentences maybe, of utterly incomprehensible Japanese, looks at me expectantly, and when it becomes clear I have no idea what she’s talking about, abruptly leans around me to gaze directly and at length upon the contents of my vacated table.

No ‘oiishi-des’s in the world can hide my abandoned tako now.

Is this a grave expression I see coming over her face as she places her hands on her thighs, bows more deeply than she yet has, and sends me on my way? Or is it just me projecting my shame?

Flying Through Lemon Meringue Pie

The ground staff at Tokyo Haneda airport, tiny uniformed Lego people from the window of the 767, wave and bob and bow and salute excitedly at our Asahikawa-bound plane like they’re from the 1940’s when families still gathered to wave their handkerchiefs at departing airplanes.

We rise through so many layers of smog-yellow clouds that it feels as though we’re flying through lemon meringue pie, but when, an hour an a half later, we break through them again on the way down, I see a totally unfamiliar landscape. Someone has sliced the very top layer off of the Midwestern United States, big square plots and cows and crops at all, and set it down like a quilt over mostly rolling but occasionally jagged hills. But in the distance, flat-topped volcanoes rise through the misty clouds, and in the even farther distance, the sparkling curve of the ocean appears, a sweeping peninsula cutting into it. As we bank to make our landing, double-peaked Daisetsuzan suddenly rises close on the right, still slightly snowy in July.

The fact that American Airlines’ idea of a vegetarian meal had been white rice with boiled cauliflower on top, along with the fact that I had chosen to go to the Saryo Itoen at Haneda and eat matcha green tea ice cream with red beans and mochi instead of anything resembling an actual dinner, catches up with me in a big way as I ride the bus from Asahikawa airport to downtown. Briefly, I curse my luck arriving so late when there will almost certainly be no restaurants open to feed me, nor energy to sit down and have a meal even if any were, but when I alight I remember – duh – I’m in Japan, where the nearest 7-11 will give me delicious onigiri (rice balls) fit for a queen, and the nearest corner will overflow with drink vending machines.

So, at 9:00pm, munching on delicious cod roe and horseradish wrapped in rice and seaweed with one hand and drinking lemon-flavored coconut water with the other, I navigate the dark, deserted-but-for-the-occasional-businessman-on-a-bicycle streets to my hostel.

Have You Tried This Before?

I’ve noticed that many (if not most) of my most enjoyable meals are preceded by a waiter or waitress trying their best to dissuade me from ordering them.

Bún Nước Lèo Sóc Trăng at Sóc Trăng Restaurant: “This soup…a little bit stink.” (while holding nose)

Bún Mắm Nước Lèo Bạc Liêu at Thanh Mai: “Even some Vietnamese people don’t like it.”

Bún Mít Mắm Nêm at Ngự Bình: “This dish, I think, not for you.”

Oc Len Xao Dua at C&C Express: “Uh, you know snail, right?!”

Hột Vịt Lộn at Hột Vịt Lộn Long An : “Egg with BABY.” (Direct, meaningful eye contact.)

Thịt Heo Luộc Cuốn Tôm Chua at Huế Ơi: “The shrimp is fermented! Pickled. If you don’t like it I will replace it for you.” (Later, watching me take – and enjoy – each bite: “Is it OK? I will replace it with something else!”)

Ốc Lá Lốt at Chả Ốc Gia Huy: “You know… we have grilled pork too.”

Lest you think it’s just Vietnamese places warning me about fish sauce, anchovy paste, or some iteration of fermented sea creature:

Udang Sambal Petai at Mutiara: “Have you had this before? Maybe you shouldn’t.” (After pressing for more information: “When you go to the bathroom it will smell.”)

Shirako at Ohshima: “Do you know shirako? I will tell you what it is after you eat it.”

Preserved Egg With Eggplant and Chili at Xi An Tasty: “So, this egg purple and green…”

Spicy Fish Paste Curry at Yoma Myanmar: “Not fish… fish paste. Not the same.”

Etc., etc.

This is embarrassing to admit, but before I gave it careful thought, this type of thing used to really offend me. I felt discriminated against as a white person (I KNOW, but I was in my twenties) and that it wasn’t fair that everyone assumed my tastebuds would prefer all the mainstream, bland menu items. I’m so misunderstood. Why must people judge my tastebuds by the color of my skin? I would lament as I added way too much purple shrimp paste to my baby clam salad just to prove a point to the waitress (who was not watching and did not care).

Finally, I came to the simple realization that everyone just wants the people they feed to like the food they feed them. That’s why my family used to try so hard to cook for my vegetarian ex-boyfriend despite a) not agreeing with his dietary choices and b) him preferring to just eat cereal anyway. They wanted his tastebuds (even though they thought that his tastebuds were stupid) to enjoy themselves. They wanted him to feel cared for and considered.

No restaurant wants to shock a new customer out of her presumed comfort zone with a brined, weeks-dried green and purple mushy gelatinous egg, and have her throw up or scream or cry and make a scene. Obviously. But it also doesn’t want the customer to suffer in silence or even be quietly unpleasantly surprised with all the weirdness happening in her mouth. They just want her to enjoy her food. And assuming that a white customer is going to be unfamiliar with – and perhaps offended by – fermented shrimp paste or fish testicles or duck fetuses or snails is not at all unreasonable.

It’s great that I have become more tolerant of people treating me with human decency and all, but I still need to examine my affinity for trying the oddest-looking thing on the menu just because it’s the oddest-looking thing on the menu. There are some things I just plain straight-up actually love, like fish/shrimp/anchovy paste, cod testicles, and betel leaves, but there are other things, like duck fetuses and the slimy or rubbery types of snails (i.e. most of them), that I eat just because they’re not something I’d normally eat. In the best case scenario, this can be traced to my natural affinity for novelty. In the worst-case scenario, it reeks of exoticism, appropriation, and other fancy ways of describing individuals from dominant cultures being insensitive, bumbling jerks.

Realistically, it’s probably somewhere in the middle. I do believe that many of us narrow our experiences unnecessarily. When it comes to food, that tendency can cause harm. Only being open to eating certain parts of the animal, for example, leads to massive, widespread waste, with animals being killed for a mere fraction of their flesh. (Shark fin soup comes to mind here, as well as male baby chicks being slaughtered at birth.) Being open to all that is edible reduces waste and invites diversity of crops – which in turn provides them with some protection against pests/disease/natural disaster.

So maybe my insistence on trying the most unfamiliar thing on the menu is a little questionable on the cultural sensitivity scale, but the intention behind it is pure. Let’s hope the justification isn’t just a post-hoc scramble.

Portland: Food Carts and the Surface of the World

“Don’t miss the food carts,” said pretty much everyone when I mentioned I was visiting Portland.

Having never been to a city in the US where semipermanent food cart encampments were allowed (cities in China, Korea, Malaysia, etc, sure, but not in the US) I sort of blew off this advice, figuring they meant something like a food truck gathering, which in LA is now synonymous with hordes of hipsters, $20 parking, and hour-long lines.

What they meant, it turns out, is that on random street corners throughout the city, the edges of parking lots are full of trailers, RVs, converted buses, wheel-less or wheeled trucks, or tiny houses, serving food from all over the world. They have weird hours and even weirder seating options, and look a lot like the encampments at Slab City, but their menus are overall pretty mouthwatering-looking.

There’s a lot of emphasis on Middle Eastern food, and Egyptian and Iraqi food in particular. Dinner one night was a sabich, billed as a ‘Jewish-Iraqi breakfast’ – a soft, warm pita oozing a mixture of egg, hummus, pickled mango sauce, and eggplant guts all over the potatoes inside. This was from Wolf & Bear’s, which looked like one piece of an old-timey caravan, tucked pretty permanently in a parking lot across from a bookstore. I wish I had had time to get into the nuances of the differences between Egyptian, Iraqi, Lebanese, and Jordanian food, as the carts were pretty explicit about specifying their origin, but their menus looked identical: falafel, kabobs, hummus, dolmas, tabbouleh, etc.

On a different day, a failed attempt at eating at “the only Mauritian restaurant in the US” (apparently it has a ‘Closed When Out Of Food’ policy) led me to hold myself over with some Haitian meat pies and a papaya smoothie at Caribbean Kitchen next door. The pies’ dough was perfectly light and flaky, graduating slowly into a melty symbiosis with the meat filling, which felt like all its spices had been muted.

Thus over-breaded, I stole bites here and there of my companion’s vegan hiyashi ramen, an angry red cauldron of shichimi togarashi (Japanese seven spice), oil, mushrooms, cabbages, and very al dente noodles. The overall effect was somewhere between that chunky red pepper paste served at dim sum restaurants and a mushroom salad dressed in oil. Not one to shy away from excessive oil, my lunch the next day was a plate of meat oil-soaked kielbasa, pierogi, and cabbage stew from a cart at the Saturday market.

Some non-food cart adventures included a vegetarian combination Ethiopian lunch plate, trendy ‘Korean-fusion restaurant‘ (I put this in quotes because there was very little Korean about my honey-anchovy encrusted potato chips, Dungeness crab seaweed noodle concoction, or the okay-I-guess-vaguely-Korean-esque scordalia pancake topped with gravlax and greens), a ramen joint that didn’t skimp on the Sichuan peppercorns (yes, Sichuan hot-pot-inspired ramen!), and an outrageously tasty goat-milk/marionberry jam/habanero ice cream. Right before leaving, I enjoyed a neat, spare, and walnut-brea-accompanied Swedish hash with trout, getting to the restaurantmere minutes before the rest of Portland.

It sounds like I had a world-traipsingly good time, and I did, in a way. If you want a the most accessible tour of the culinary surface of the world, you can’t do much better than Portland. However, my travel-scarred tastebuds tell me that it was just that: the surface. Nowhere were my preconceptions or preferences challenged, my mouth heated to more than a ‘mild’ (except for in the case of the Sichuan peppercorn ramen), or my horizons expanded. Everything I ate was well within the comfort zone of the average mildly adventurous American. Not once did I have to try and parse an unfamiliar language or a questionable translation, make an embarrassing faux-pas, or feel like a visitor to a different culture’s space.

It felt like everything was being marketed TO me -or at least the part of me that exists as a white American culinary tourist. I was the intended audience. Not the people whose culture’s food was being marketed.

I’m not knocking Portland for this, necessarily. If you want to make the most money, you obviously want to market to your biggest, well, market, and in Portland, maybe that’s the mainly white American culinary tourist. And maybe this kind of dabbling leads to more people being more open and experimental with food choices. I didn’t start out eating pork knuckles and beef tendons. First I needed to know that pork knuckles and beef tendons were food and were being served at restaurants. Others may need a larger shove than just awareness: first sausage, then blood sausage, then blood cubes, then raw goat blood pudding, for example?

Still, such extreme accessibility, no matter how convenient and at times even tasty, feels weird and a little icky. I’d rather pay a steeper price of admission into another culture’s universe.

My favorite thing about Portland was something that needed no marketing at all: the local berries! Vancouver (Washington)’s farmers market provided me with all the marionberries, tiny strawberries, and Rainier cherries that I could eat, and the flavors were so wholly different from anything available in California that they instantly made the whole trip worth it.