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.

Taiwan: Above the Undercurrent

I went to Taiwan – yes, that Taiwan, the Taiwan guidebooks and mainstream food websites and niche food websites and travel blogs galore lose their minds over – over the Thanksgiving week in 2015, and never wrote about it.

It wasn’t because I didn’t enjoy it, or because I found everything too thoroughly explored already by others (though the latter is certainly an excuse I’d make). It was because I had this nagging feeling, even as I gorged on new-to-me things like egg-yolk-taro balls or oyster omelets or mystery shells stuffed with cheese or sausages stuffed with other sausages – that I was barely grazing the surface of what Taiwan had to offer. Beneath the seething mass of street stalls and teenagers, I felt there was an undercurrent, a base even, of a more careful culinary tradition that I wouldn’t be able to break into unless I traveled with a group of people. Better yet, a group of people who spoke the language (one of Taiwan’s three main ones, anyway).

I didn’t have a group. This trip was singularly solitary. I traveled around Taipei and the countryside alone, looking mesmerizedly out of the windows of trains and buses and mountain gondolas. There was a four day stretch where I used my vocal chords for less than 3 collective minutes per day. I loved it.

But when it came to dining, my chosen solitude and imposed linguistic ignorance limited me. It caused me to mainly mill around night markets, where I could assess visually what was on offer, point at what I wanted without using words, and enjoy my choice in single-serving sizes, sitting alone. Sometimes the food was on a stick, sometimes in a tiny paper bowl, sometimes in a bag. I got to eat it standing up, sitting on a curb, sitting in a park, or on my way to the metro. Occasionally I got snapped at if I tried to order something ridiculously small, like one egg-yolk taro ball (“minimum two!”) or a single skewer of cumin-rubbed mutton (“minimum three!”) but for the most part I was able to keep my portions small enough that I got to sample five or six different stands for each dinner.

Now, given the option, this is usually how I prefer to eat. I touched on the topic in my entry on Spain. I don’t go in for pomp and circumstance and decor and ambience and service and plating very often. I’m happier with my butt planted on a curb, eating out of a box, watching the world go by.

But as I sat, butt planted, world-watching, enjoying my bites, I knew that inside all the buildings with the indecipherable lettering, there were families and groups of friends sitting around tables enjoying a cuisine that was very different from my seafood sticks and grilled meats. I got a tiny taste of this wandering down Yongkang St one day, when I saw a restaurant that both had pictures of its menu items on the wall and looked relatively fancy. (Sadly, Taiwan largely lacks the Korean and Japanese tradition of molding plastic versions of their dishes to display outside the door.) I took this as the golden opportunity that it was, pointing excitedly at the picture of what looked like an entire bowl filled with shell-less oysters, plus a plate of mystery greens and stalks covered in what may have been either sesame or peanut powder.

I got the last seat in the restaurant. The other tables were full of groups, passing delectable-looking dishes back and forth or spinning them around on the tables’ Lazy Susans. They took chopstickfuls of food from the common plate and thoughtfully chewed – more thoughtfully than most do when they are also chatting. I saw the food arrest them, momentarily tear them away from their conversations. There was no mindless chewing or hurried swallowing between shouted sentences like, I don’t know, most American sports bars, for example. The food held a presence equal to another guest at the table.

When I received my bowl of oysters, it was large, with a bathtub-warm broth that softened its sticks of ginger and furls of seaweed. The oysters were a pillowy mess of ocean, and though it initially seemed crazily decadent to eat an entire bowlful of oysters without having to work to get them out of their shells, I finished them with little trouble or guilt. They were tiny sweet morsels with not a rotten one in the bunch. And the mystery greens, which I found out a month later from Yelper Karen L. were sweet potato leaves, collected just the right amount of bonito dew from their own warm broth. The powder on top was sesame, and somehow stayed dry and out of the path of the dew. The stalks crunched, but the leaves collapsed under my tongue.

This meal was the best in Taiwan, and worth every penny of the maybe $12 (US) it cost, but having it made me realize how much I was missing. For every restaurant with photos, there were twenty without, and who knew what lay within them? Having spent much of my life with a vegetarian boyfriend, I’m familiar with the feeling of loss that comes when I find myself in a restaurant with a family-style meat dish – Beijing duck, Sichuan whole fish, Tibetan yak stew – that I’d never be able to tackle on my own. But since that vegetarian boyfriend spoke Chinese, I had not yet experienced the loss of being a linguistic outsider and not even knowing what was on offer.

I wished there had been (or I’d sought out) a Taiwanese version of that couple who takes tourists around Saigon on motorbikes and has them eat snails and shellfish and goat.

So, my memories of Taiwan are fond, but consist mostly of slices of night market life. Watching a man scoop fried squid out of a steamy metal bucket, wondering at its crunch and how it retained it with all the steam.

Choosing between five varieties of egg custard – flecked with sesame seeds, swirled with burnt caramel, topped with cream cheese.

Discovering street sushi that reminded me of a Japanese festival in Orange County. Eating something that was either intestines or penis while a crowd gathered to closely await my reaction.

Smelling the combined smoke of hundreds of of pieces of smoldering meat and letting the background noise coalesce into a hum.

Next time, I’m bringing a Chinese speaker, so that hum distills into connection.