You can find restaurants on the main streets of most every city. For eats on the cheap, you can find generic-looking eateries on the main ...
You can find restaurants on the main streets of most every city. For eats on the cheap, you can find generic-looking eateries on the main streets, back streets and alleys of any city or town. Small restaurants often open in the morning and stay open until late at night, sometimes closing for a few hours in the afternoon if business is light.
In the mornings, every town, village and small city neighbourhood has one or more places serving breakfast. These places open at dawn, and are usually scrubbing the grills clean by 10am. Breakfast shouldn't cost more than NT50, usually less.
All Taiwanese cities have Western-style restaurants, and the bigger the city the more and varied the restaurants. Taipei has a large international restaurant scene with places serving cuisine from around the globe. Restaurants generally open between 11am and noon for lunch, close around 2pm and reopen in the evening for dinner. Some stay open all day, while others don't. Bars often keep long hours in Taiwan, opening in the afternoon and closing late at night. Most bars offer a limited menu and some offer full course meals. Expect to pay around NT150 or more for a beer.
Quick Eats
One experience you can't miss out on is eating at a night market. Though Taipei's night markets are arguably the most famous, all cities in Taiwan have at least a few of their own, and even a medium-sized town will have a street set up with food stalls selling traditional Taiwanese eats late into the night. We've listed our favourite night markets in our city headings, but you're sure to find ones you like all over the island.
So what kind of eats can you expect to find on the fly in Taiwan? Some items won't surprise people used to eating Asian food back home. Taiwanese dumplings are always a good bet, especially for those looking to fill up on the cheap. Stuffed with meat, spring onion and greens, can be served by the bowl in a soup, and sometimes dry by weight. Locals mix chilli, vinegar and soy sauce in a bowl according to taste. Vinegar and soy sauce look almost identical, so Taiwanese people won't mind if you give the plastic bottles a squeeze and a sniff. Dumplings are often created by family minifactories - one person stretches the pastry, another makes the filling and a third spoons the filling into the pastry, finishing with a little twist to seal it.
Other street snacks include fried tofu, tofu soaked in soy sauce, and baked sweet potatoes, which can be bought by weight. Probably the most recognizable Taiwanese street snack is stinky tofu. This deep-fried dish is something of an acquired taste, like certain European cheeses. Generally speaking people either love the stuff or they can't stand it. Another strange food to keep an eye open for are thousand year eggs - ducks' eggs that are covered in straw and stored underground for six months. The yolk becomes green and the white becomes jelly. More interesting snacks available at markets include chickens' feet, pigs' ears, pigs' trotters, and even pigs' faces.
Meals
A traditional breakfast in Taiwan usually consists of watery rice with seaweed, clay-oven rolls and steamed buns, served plain hot soybeen milk. Other popular breakfast foods include rolled omelettes, egg sandwiches, and turnip cakes. Most breakfast places open at about 7am and close midmorning.
The Taiwanese generally eat lunch between 11.30am and 2pm, many taking their midday meal from any number of small eateries on the streets. Self-serve cafeterias are a good option, and they offer plenty of meat and vegetable dishes to choose from.
Dinner in Taiwan is usually eaten from 5pm to 11pm, though some restaurants and food stalls in bigger cities stay open 24 hours. Taiwan's cities - especially the larger ones - all have a fair to excellent selection of international restaurants; don't be surprised to run into a small Indonesian, Indian, or even Mexican eatery on a back alley.
Eating with kids
Taiwan is a kid-friendly place and children often have free run of the restaurants when eating out (often to the consternation of those hoping for a quiet meal). Budget eateries won't have special menus for children (you'll be lucky if they have English menus), but some might have booster seats. Higher-end restaurants usually have both kids' menus and booster seats. A good bet for dining with kids on the cheap is to take them to a buffet restaurant, where they can pick and chose from colourful dishes to their heart's content. Another fun bet is to bring them to a pet-friendly restaurant, a new trend in Taiwan. Why just eat when you can eat surrounded by puppies and the occasional pot-bellied pig, eh?
Travellers with infants will find everything they need from baby formula to puréed baby foods as well as infant cereals. Every Taiwanese supermarket has at least an aisle for newborn fare.
0 comments:
Post a Comment