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.