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.
Obviously I wasn’t going to leave Vietnam without having pho. I’m not a crazy person.
I didn’t know this before getting here, but there are actually two types of pho: there’s the beef version, called pho bo. That’s the one that we’re more familiar with back home. There’s also a chicken version called pho ga.
I tried both, of course. Again, I’m not a crazy person.
…And maybe the greatest sandwich I’ve ever had, period? It’s right up there, that’s for sure.
Pho may be the thousand pound gorilla of Vietnamese noodle soups — it’s the one that pretty much every single person on the planet has heard of — but it’s certainly not the only one.
Take, for example, bun bo hue. I just had a bowl of it at Bun Bo Hue Nam Giao, and it made a strong case that there should be room in your life for more than one noodle soup from Vietnam.
One of the many (many many) things I love about ramen is how much variety you get from bowl to bowl. There are so many different styles and types and varieties of ramen that what seems like it should be a simple dish (it’s just noodles and soup) has so much to offer.