I mentioned food. Here’s food. (But first some background)

Since I left home and was gifted complete control over my meals, I have lived my diet in three overlapping ‘phases’; they are simple and shall be described briefly:

1/ an obsession with eliminating all fat from my diet.

2/ an avoidance of all processed sugars.

3/ veganism.

The first two phases were birthed by a massive fear of my irregularities and by a need to be (or feel) beautiful. The third phase had a more complicated origin in the ethics and aesthetics of consumption. The first (very misguided) phase ended after my first year of university, the second phase lingers even now. Gradually, as I grew and became more comfortable and less afraid, I relaxed my principles and eventually started eating fish and eggs; thus ended phase three.

When I realised Taipei had place in my immediate future, I decided that I would again eat meat. I thought about returning to veganism (Taiwan has a sizeable Taoist/Buddhist vegan population) but Su’s family are not vegan and I was to be living, in a very real way, ‘with them’, and so wanted to minimise my differences and be as unintrusive as possible. Also, I watched YouTube videos in which very excited people ate Taiwanese food and became, impossibly, still more excited. And I wanted to feel like they did.

However, immediately after arriving in Taipei, I sat in the crowded noise of 101’s food hall to eat pork vermicelli noodles and a thin soup with a ball of reformed meat floating unnaturally on its surface. The pork taste was strong and it was new and I felt a little sad, as though I’d failed and become an incomplete or slightly distorted version of my chosen adult self.

How quickly that sadness faded…

(With that in mind, we begin):

Food and cooking and eating are ‘different’ in Taipei than they are in the UK. Mechanically and chemically they are, of course, much the same (apply heat &c. &c.), but in Taipei the difference in cost between buying your own ingredients and buying a meal from a restaurant is often very small. This means people here eat out a lot more than people do in the UK.

But before I write my best erotic descriptions of food (no, not really) I think it’s necessary to further explain Taipei’s commercial food ecosystem. I mentioned everybody visiting restaurants every day. This is true but it is not true in the way you might be thinking. People do not spend every lunchtime and every evening luxuriating in restaurants with a maître d’ and an attentive waiting staff. Well, I’m sure some people do, but people don’t. Naturally, this being a large city, there are restaurants in Taipei that are extremely expensive and there are restaurants that are less expensive and there are restaurants that are cheap and those that are cheaper. And then there is xiaochi.

Xiaochi, meaning ‘small eats’, is the type of Taiwanese food that people eat most frequently when away from their homes. It is the cheapest and the quickest meal. I have found it difficult to define or understand purely in terms of its ingredients and its flavours, and easier to group by the environment and manner of its consumption. Typically, Xiaochi is eaten in noisy rooms under naked 60-watt lights and next to fans which spin forever loud and laboured. Often the kitchen is situated at the front of the premises, leaving a person-wide gap for the restaurant’s entrance. The cooking food’s steam is twisted into the street by battered ventilators. A large outward facing menu obscures the chef’s head. On the tables: pad-of-paper menus with red pencils to mark your order and return to the proprietor.

Within the Xiaochi food group, there are many dishes, but it seems that an important factor in your business qualifying as a Xiaochi restaurant is for your establishment to specialise in just one (I guess this narrow focus pushes each meal towards perfection and keeps things cheap). Here is a list of my favourites; all can be found for under 1GBP:

Dan Zai Mian — this is a noodle dish with a shrimp flavoured broth, topped with ground pork, a single prawn, and chopped green onions. This is the meal that made it okay for me to eat meat; it’s that good.

Lu Ro Fan — this is a steamed rice dish with a topping of sweet ground pork stewed in soy sauce. It’s the cheapest ‘main’ and can be had for NT25 (around 50 pence)

Gua bao — this is the ‘Taiwanese Burger’ fast approaching ubiquity in London’s trendy street-food scene. It’s a steamed ball of dough which is sliced and filled with ground and sweetened peanuts, chopped coriander, and stewed pork.

Hujiao bing — this is similar to the Gua bao. It’s a ball of dough half coated with sesame seeds. It has a hollow centre filled with sugared pieces of pork and sliced spring onion. It’s like a semi-savoury doughnut. After shaping and filling, the ball is slapped onto the wall of a coal-heated cylindrical oven and left there until baked hard and browned. There is a perfect amount of crunch and bite and chew and a perfect ratio of savoury to sweet. This is probably the best thing I have ever eaten.

Little sausage inside big sausage: this is a steamed sticky-rice sausage, sliced and stuffed with a smaller pork sausage. It is topped with sauces and fried spring onions and then wrapped tight in waxed paper left open at its top. It’s messy, so you are advised to twist the closed end and in doing so so squeeze the hot-dog out of its sheath; it’s probably the second best thing I have ever eaten.

There is more food, but those are the best foods (excepting those I have forgotten).

To go with the main dish, in one corner of a Xiaochi restaurant there will often be a fridge for you to open and pick more food from a number of prepared salads. These salads are crucial; the principle element of a Xiaochi meal often has only a limited amount of green, and despite me no longer being vegan, I do enjoy vegetables.

A sharp marinated tofu and seaweed salad is very common, as is sweet pickled cabbage, as is a sliced turnip, as is sweetened and salted dried fish, as is steamed leafy green vegetables topped with ground pork. And so too is a vegetable, new to me, called ‘bitter melon’. Bitter melon is a savoury vegetable, somewhat similar in shape and colour to a cucumber, with a bubbling blistered skin, typically served sliced and salted. It has a hard crunch and a high water content and limited flavour on the first bite. However, after a moment’s chewing, the bitterness becomes very prominent. Su orders bitter melon often and so, despite an initial aversion (its bitterness being too keen of a surprise), thanks to habituating repetition, I now enjoy its flavour.

There will also very likely be a table with a tower of small stacked paper plates into which you can spoon spicy oil and pour soy sauce or vinegar. The food in Taiwan is, when subjected to a brutal generalisation, less rich and salty and spicy than the Sichuan-Chinese food of UK takeaways, and its restaurants leave it to you to increase your meal’s intensity.

All of this is good. I like xiaochi.

The traditional Taiwanese breakfast is another food area worth writing about.

Unless you are in a Starbucks, in a mall, or in another of the large cafe chains, your breakfast’s environment will likely be very similar to the xiaochi restaurant (which is, by the way, perfect). The breakfast I eat most frequently is an egg and chive omelette, laid atop a thin disc of dough, rolled or wrapped into a layered bar, coated in sesame seeds and then baked; I drink with it a hot soya drink, which comes served in a bowl. There are also steamed buns containing spiced minced pork; sliced buns with omelette fillings; steamed fruit-&-nut bread; salted soya porridge with seafood and deep-fried dough pieces that are crunchy at first but turn very chewy very quickly; that same deep-fried dough as a stick, unchopped and wrapped by pan fried bread; and of course there are other options.

Breakfast is really cheap, each of the above-listed items costs between NT15 and NT30 (between 30 and 60 pence)

This next piece of Taipei’s food world is the most famous piece of Taipei’s food world: its night markets.

There are many night markets in Taipei but all those I’ve visited have been similar: a long row (or more than one long row) of back-to-back food stands, every space busy enough to restrict free movement, with a common direction of shuffled walking through the market. The food is cheap and its quality varies, but there is always enough choice to become far too full on several different snacks. A few stands have seating, but only a few.

Every night market will have its select stands that can somehow, even there, where there is five of everything and ten of everything else, manage (all night) to sustain a lengthy queue of patient customers. These are the famous stands, covered extensively by the local news, and they often have a collage, made from clippings of their time in the media, stuck to their walls.

At this point I shall deviate finally and write just a little more about the queues for food in Taipei.

Today at lunchtime, Su and I passed the original branch of Din Tai Fung, the celebrated chain of dim sum restaurants. Outside, affixed to the building, there was a red LCD display counting through ticket numbers and indicating the approximate length of the wait for a table inside. The time showed 90(!) minutes and the queue spilled in an unsorted mass across two street corners.

A couple of days after arriving in Taipei, Su and I decided at 0400, in a very short-sighted move, to try and rid ourselves of jet lag by staying awake overnight and into the next day. We ate noodles in a rowdy after-club spot and drank beer sitting on a wall. We took a taxi to a 24h bookstore, browsed books and stepped over slumped manga-reader-sleepers. Later, when hungry, we Googled ‘best breakfasts in taipei’ and found somewhere highly recommended. It was just before 0700 on a Saturday morning when we emerged from underground and knew immediately which was ‘our’ restaurant. The breakfast place was on a building’s 2nd floor and the queue stretched along the corridor, down the stairs, out of the doors, and snaked around two sides of the building.

Rido, the wife of Su’s uncle, said that she doesn’t trust restaurants where there is no queue.

What I am doing, in relating these anecdotes, is trying to show (rather than tell) how it seems to me that people don’t mind queuing for food in Taipei. However, to provide a counter to these stories, and for the sake of fair objectivity, I will admit that neither of Su’s parents like queuing, at all.