Any retelling of another place, whether that place be the new shop across your building, or somewhere miles and seas away, won’t be complete without recounting the food. A Filipino trying to eat in Taiwan won’t have to worry about unfamiliarity— Chowking has made sure of that, along with North Park, and Tokyo Tokyo.
But first, a quick word on a special place.
Jiufen Old Street was one of the items in our itinerary that I was really looking forward to. A quick Google of the place will immediately tell you why. It’s riddled with lanterns, it harkens to an old word, supposedly long gone but now preserved and celebrated, and most compelling of all, it’s what inspired the setting in Hayao Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away”.
The Jiufen of today is hardly a commune of ghosts and mystical beings. Instead it’s a very, very, very busy shopping area. Did i say very? Of all the places we visited, it’s the one that you could justifiably call a “tourist trap”. I’ve heard Jiufen’s charms really surface at night, when there are less people and when the lanters light up and dot the skyline.
Unfortunately, Jiufen is where tour agencies take their guests to have lunch, so we had to experience this supposed magical village at the height of sunshine and foot traffic. When we got to Jiufen, our objectives were clear and simple: 1) find the famed A-Mei tea house, and 2) have lunch. Not at the tea house of course, because we were reasonable tourists with reasonable budgets. Our stomachs plotted our course, however, and we decided to prioritize eating instead.
After A Full Belly, All Is Poetry
Taiwan cuisine is about exactly as you would expect it to be — heavily influenced by Chinese, but still distinctly theirs. The spice levels are tolerable, and I say this as a regular Filipino who can only take the mildest of bicol express variants. Thankfully, there was a lot of rice. A good rule of thumb is that if you order something from the pricier places, you would probably get 2–3 side dishes to go with it, mostly vegetables or some pickle.
We went to Yongkang Street and tried out the signature Taiwanese beef noodle, which I loved. The soup was flavourful and rich, but not decadent to the point that you can’t finish it. It’s the legitimate version of the Lucky Me noodles that were my staple back in college. Noodles came in either ramen style (round) or sliced (flat).
We also went to Chun Shui Tang in Taichung. Their new Hua Diao barbecue chicken reminded me of a slightly more savoury tinola. My mom and sister ordered the Dongpo pork set, and they said it was similar to pork humba, if your humba was the type to be ridiculously tenderized to the point that it fell apart at the poke of a chopstick.
The Chun Shui Tang branch in Taichung is supposedly where the original bobba milk tea was invented, so we didn’t waste the chance of tasting the “original” milk tea as it was supposed to be. In the seven days we were in Taiwan, we drank five milk teas. Some might say that’s excessive but I think the milk tea in Taiwan is formulated differently than how it is in the Philippines, in a way that it’s possible for you to drink it everyday without developing health issues.
First off, Taiwan bobba tea is not sweet — that’s a Philippine invention. Their bobba tea tastes primarily of, well, tea. We tried the bobba tea from Coco to see how it would compare to the Coco milk tea back home, and there was a marked difference in sweetness levels. Milk tea is also generally cheaper as long as you buy it from non-tourist areas. The local Coco milk tea in large costs NTD 40 or approximately PHP 66, whereas it would cost PHP 95 back home.
For sugar lovers, there’s the brown sugar pearl milk tea where the pearl itself has been soaked in brown sugar syrup. It looks a lot like taho, but is less sweet still.
Taiwanese cuisine isn’t complete without its streetfood. In busy shopping districts, eating while walking is a perfectly acceptable practice, especially if there are no sit-and-eat diners. There’s the usual fried fare — chicken, squid, sweet potato fries, taro balls. One particular shop that always had a long queue was Hot Star, which sold breaded fried chicken the size of your face. If I could call to mind something similar back home, I’d say it tasted like the chicken chops in Serenitea, except it’s as big as your face.
We also tried out wheel cakes, which were these round pancakes filled with red bean paste, taro, custard, or cheese. The name comes from the shape of the snack and the mold they use to cook it. Further research has led me to discover that these are in fact of Japanese origin, which is probably why the cooking process reminded me of takoyaki. The wheel cakes are great snacks especially when still hot. Best served with coffee, or more tea!
The Quiet Can Listen, Being Silent From The Start
I always cap off a review by leaving a word on the people I’ve met. This time took some difficulty, primarily because of the language barrier. Interactions were limited to financial transactions, and so long as you could point to things and count money, you were all right. So instead of fully formed opinions, I had impressions. The Taiwanese people are like so:
○ Like Norman, our tour guide to the Northern coast. Former army colonel, now retired for some reason and spending his days holding up a yellow flag and minding slow-walking tourists. Pleasant, but frighteningly efficient. Will smile and take your picture. Will also leave you in the middle of nowhere if you’re late.
○ Like our unnnamed lady receptionist. Never got to remember what our room was (“Oh, 308!”) but always greeted us with a smile, no matter the time. I remember a man entering the hotel, bowing to her, and leaving again—dropping by as a gesture of paying your respects, a familiar sight.
○ Like the family of four eating at the hotel’s mess at 3pm. Quiet, so quiet. No boisterous laughter, no parent admonishing their child, just a family eating, together.
○ Like the man sat beside me in McDonald’s watching the NBA on his phone. He didn’t order anything, he just sat there watching basketball clips the entire time.
○ Like the bus driver who took us from Central Taiwan Science Park to National Taichung Theater. We were supposed to go to the high speed rail terminal and somehow ended up in the opposite side of the city. He picked us up, a bunch of frazzled tourists in the middle of nowhere, night fast approaching, and with his meager English deciphered where we wanted to go. When he dropped us off, he alighted from his bus and gave us a piece of paper with precise instructions — like a father sending out their child to the big city. We didn’t get his name.
So, that’s Taiwan.
I think I would like to go back here someday. To see all the art museums and visit all the night markets. Maybe, if the stars are aligned and if I had a proper guide, I’d go back to Taichung. To see the flower village and visit the natural science museum.
It marvels me how there are so many things to try, in a country only about 1/8 the size of mine. Which makes me think that there must also be so many things to try at home —and that I’m just too embedded in the inanities of traffic and smog and city hustle to appreciate it. There is wonder here too, if only we let ourselves find it.
