Food: what's good and what isn't in Taipei

Food is an important part of every single day. So here's a reference of where to get it and what to order, for my own benefit mostly.

Beef noodle soup is good, and can be found at the night market. Ask for something like "nio ro mien". There are tones in that phrase, but I can't be bothered to stick in the proper diacritics.

The school cafeterias have decent food in decent quantities for NT$50 (US$1.50) a meal. Go for the big cafeteria, because the smaller one has a smaller selection of generally slimy unpleasant food. Actually, "slimy unpleasant food" is a pretty major theme at the school's cafeterias, but in the bigger one you can usually avoid it. Go for fish, simple vegetable dishes like green beans, and fairly plain-looking meat. If you can find meat that's got weird red stuff on it, that's usually a safe choice. A bowl of rice and a bowl of that weird thin soup they have in the soup cauldrons will finish off the meal nicely. This is the staple of my diet.

There's a "noodle" restaurant that has the best dumpling soup I've ever had in Taiwan. Most places serve pretty nasty dumplings, but for NT$40-50 you can get a big bowl of soup with dumplings, scallions, lettuce, and broth. Hooray for broth! The location changes, I think: at lunch there's a stall at the market, but for dinner you have to go into the market, and take a left turn down a side street about halfway through. The restaurant will be on your right.

There's a bakery nearby called "Florida Bakery" which sells moderately priced baked goods. Actually, the baked goods are generally cheaper and better than the stuff you see sold at all the other stores, so it's a good place to pick up some bread. They sell a small loaf of dinner-roll type bread with a light dusting of sugar on top for NT$22 -- about 67 cents. It's a lot of bread for only 67 cents, and remarkably tasty. Avoid anything with "curry" in the name; it may look tempting, but it will only end in disappointment.

There are restaurants all over the place. Unfortunately they tend not to have anything written in English, nor even in the Roman alphabet that I like so much. If you go to a place with written menus, just look for something with a reasonable price (written in Arabic numerals, like "4" and "2") and put a single dash in the empty box to the right of the menu item. Then hope you made the right call and didn't just order a big plate of pig intestines and congealed pig's blood.

Speaking of blood, Taiwan has some weird foods that are probably better enjoyed by not eating them. Congealed goose or pig's blood is one of those foods. The taste is not really that bad but it's still pretty unpleasant, which combines with the texture and the fact that you're eating congealed blood to form a rather sub-par culinary experience. Stinky tofu is another of Taiwan's traditional delicacies, and it's better off avoided. Stinky tofu gets its name from the stench with which it befouls the air for meters downwind. The taste is earthy and surprisingly mild, but it's still not all that good -- and the smell lingers on your fingers for way too long afterward. Stinky tofu is on my list of things to erase from existance if I ever get the ability to do so with impunity.

If you go to a traditional Taiwanese restaurant, they may try to serve you rice porridge with sweet potato. It's bland and hard to eat with chopsticks (because it's porridge), and doesn't do a good job as a rice bowl for your meal. Steer clear of it.

Fish ball soup isn't as great as you would expect. Putting the balls on a stick and selling them at 7/11 doesn't make them any better. Aged hard-boiled eggs have a texture that's somewhere between eggs and leather, and they induce a surprising amount of queasyness in the stomach.