Come on, Taiwan. I know your food is great, but now you’re just showing off. The pork knuckle I just had at Zheng Pork Knuckle? Ridiculously good. It’s upsetting how good it is. I don’t live here; how am I supposed to go back and eat this a million more times??
After eating one mind-blowingly delicious meal after another here, it’s beginning to dawn on me that Taiwan is one of the best countries for food that I’ve ever visited. Everything I’ve tried has been so good, and everywhere I go there’s one restaurant after another with food that looks delicious. And the street food! And the night markets! It’s overwhelming.
I just mentioned that a cheap Michelin-rated restaurant is basically guaranteed to have a line. Well, Lin Dong Fang is (relatively) cheap, and it’s Michelin-approved, so yeah, there was a line.
If an affordable restaurant has been recognized by the Michelin Guide, you can pretty much guarantee that there’s going to be an intense line to get in. And lo and behold, the Michelin-approved Taiwanese breakfast joint, Fuhang Soy Milk, is fairly notorious for the line that snakes out the door.
There’s a Taiwanese specialty called lu rou fan (or braised pork rice) that consists of ultra-tender pork belly and mushroom on top of rice.
I don’t think there’s any universe in which that wouldn’t be delicious, and certainly, the version they sell at Jin Feng is extremely delicious.
Gua Bao (a.k.a. pork belly buns) are pretty huge in Taiwan, and having just eaten one, it’s very easy to see why.
Apparently noodles for breakfast is very conclusively a thing here, because I had noodle soup for breakfast the other day, and now here’s another plate of tasty pre-9AM noodles.
Like the noodle soup I mentioned earlier, this is another restaurant I stumbled on completely at random. It’s pretty obvious that Taipei is a great food city if it’s this easy to find amazing food.
Funnily enough, one of the best things I’ve eaten in Bangkok isn’t Thai at all — it’s Chinese, from a Michelin-rated restaurant in Bangkok’s Chinatown called Nai-Ek Roll Noodles.
Though a lot of the food I’ve been eating in Bangkok has been a bit underwhelming, there’s definitely been some good stuff, too. Such as: this amazing chicken satay I had from a place called Jay Eng.