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!
Tuesday, September 26, 2017
Monday, September 25, 2017
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…
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…
Thursday, September 14, 2017
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.
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.
Saturday, September 9, 2017
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.
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!
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)