Keelung is a small, seaside town that’s a very quick train ride from Taipei, which makes it an effortless day-trip destination. And that’s a good thing, because the night market here is definitely worth visiting.
Yes, as you can tell from the photos, I visited during the day. Despite their name, many night markets in Taiwan open in the afternoon. It’s not quite as impressive when the lanterns aren’t lit up, but all the vendors are open, so the food selection is the same.
And aside from the food, there’s a temple right in the middle of the market that’s worth checking out.
But of course, you’re not at the market to see a temple. There’s a plethora of vendors here serving some seriously amazing looking food; I figured I’d go with the busiest one, but it was a three-way tie.
There was this place, selling pig’s feet and shrimp soup:
This place, selling fried noodles and cuttlefish soup:
And this place, selling glutinous oil rice and crab soup:
I briefly considered trying all three, but that almost certainly wouldn’t have ended well. So I went with the glutinous oil rice and crab soup, mostly because I was curious about the oil rice.
The rice had a pleasantly chewy texture and was surprisingly un-greasy for something with “oil” right in its name. It had chunks of pork and mushroom mixed in, and was quite satisfying. It was slightly bland, but the hot sauce they have on the table made quick work of that.
The soup was my favourite of the two. It was mostly a fairly typical thickened soup, but the very tender, sizable chunks of crab were hard to resist. Like the rice, it wasn’t exactly a taste explosion; it was substantially improved with the addition of vinegar and the aforementioned hot sauce.
For dessert, I had… well, I’m not sure what I had. It was from this vendor:
Of course, there’s no English, and try as I might, I can’t seem to find anything about this on Google.
The dessert features small cubes of some kind of jelly-like substance that are rolled in and topped with sweetened peanut crumbs.
It was quite odd. The cubes are kind of like Jell-o, but also crunchy? I don’t really know how to describe that texture. It was weird. It was off-putting at first, but it eventually wound up (mostly) growing on me, though there was a funkiness to their flavour that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
I don’t think they’re sweetened at all — most of the flavour comes from the very tasty, sweet peanut crumbs. I’m not 100% sold on the cubes themselves, but this stuff was dynamite.
Address: No. 20, Aisi Road, Ren’ai District, Keelung City, Taiwan 200
How to find it: It’s basically right in the middle of the city, so it’s easy enough to find.