When looking for restaurant recommendations abroad, travelers always fantasize about a “local” who will guide them to the best and authentic meal. Today, as locals like us, would like to show you what we love to eat in our real lives.
Stir-Fried Dishes Restaurant 台式熱炒
Stir-friend dishes restaurant is the right place for you if you don’t want to eat with the tourists and want to try something local. Having hands of beers and some stir-fried dishes with friends could be considered as the local night life for Taiwanese. The environment of the stir-fried dishes restaurant is noisy, but it also means you can be fully relaxed and laugh as loud as you want when having meals with your friends, colleagues or family.
Each dish in the restaurant costs only 100-300 TWD , which is a very reasonable price! Some stir-fried dishes restaurants provide fresh seafood and you can pick fish or shrimp which is still alive by yourselves before the chef cook the cuisine for you.
What’s more interesting, some dishes are dubbed with really fancy names such as Ants Climbing a Tree, Old Skin Soft Flesh or Flies’ Head.
Ants Climbing a Tree
Ground meat cooked with glass noodles with soy sauce. It looks like tiny little ants climbing up the branches.
Old Skin Soft Flesh
Fried egg tofu. It looks like old people’s wrinkled skin on the outside and new-born babies’s soft skin on the inside.
Flies’ Head
Cooked with minced meat, chopped chive and fermented black beans. The big black beans look like there are some visitors on your dish.
Hot Pot / Spicy Hot Pot / Twin-side Hot Pot 火鍋
I believe hot pot is definitely one of Taiwanese favorite cuisine since we have a variety of hot pot restaurants here in Taiwan from spicy hot pot, twin-side hot pot, all-you-can eat hot pot, sukiyaki, hot pot BBQ and shabu-shabu. Oh! We even have stinky tofu hot pot!
There will be a simmering pot of soup stock at the dining table, containing a variety of ingredients such as thinly sliced meat, leaf vegetables, mushrooms, wontons, egg dumplings, tofu, and seafood…etc. The cooked food is usually eaten with a dipping sauce.
Taiwanese also pay attention to the matching the temperature of foods to the body’s needs, so in the winter, ginger duck with rice wine, mutton hotpot and Taiwanese sesame oil chicken stew are the popular hot pot as well. They are SO aromatic that will make you can’t wait to taste them.
Braised Dishes 滷味
Taiwanese people love eating braised food as it’s quick, convenient and delicious. There are two kinds of braised dishes mainly, cold and heated braised dishes.
The ingredients of braised dishes is various from vegetables, mushrooms, eggs, dried tofu to tempura. If you like to weird food (locals like us feel tasty), you can also order some animal’s entrails such us pork liver, chicken heart or duck’s gizzard.
For cold braised dishes, the ingredients are braised with soy sauce. You can eat them directly after picking what you want to eat from the vendor. For heated braised dishes, the only different is that the vendor will cook your food in hot water with soy sauce or some Chinese herbal so that the food will be tasty. You can also order the noodles and the vendor will cook them with the ingredients you pick together. Choose whether to add pickle and chopped spring onion to add some flavor.