Cheap-Ass Lunches in Taiwan

One of the best things about Asia is the abundance of restaurants and vendors serving tasty, cheap-ass food. These places are especially good to hit up for lunch because they serve the food quickly and earnestly, wasting no time on social pleasantries or the rattling-off of daily specials. Usually, each vendor specializes in dishes focusing around a main ingredient (i.e. beef noodle soup, roasted duck, etc). If only more restaurants with the same business plan existed for us here in the US.

From the wet market:

Ba wan: kind of like a savory mochi filled with ground pork, ginger, mushrooms, and topped with gravy

From a noodle soup place:
Beef noodle soup with tendon. The noodles were handmade and thus had marvelous toothfeel, the Taiwanese word for which is "kiu."


From a pork restaurant:


Top to bottom: homemade Chinese sausage (xiang chang); stewed ground pork (kou rou); pork chop and rice with pickled greens (pai gu fan)


From a duck vendor:

Top to bottom: duck soup with Chinese herbs; sauteed duck intestines with bean sprouts and scallion

mouthfeel

just a quick post to sing the praises of gregoire's crispy potato puffs (and to continue the fried spud love). the aioli that comes with the puffs is good but on my most recent visit, i realized that it has distracted me all of these years from the best part about the puffs -- the crispy, smooth mouthfeel.





taken from wiki: Mouthfeel is a product’s physical and chemical interaction in the mouth. It is a concept used in many areas related to the testing and evaluating of foodstuffs, such as wine-tasting and rheology. It is evaluated from initial perception on the palate, to first bite, through mastication to swallowing and aftertaste. In wine-tasting, for example, mouthfeel is usually used with a modifier (big, sweet, tannic, chewy, etc.) to the general sensation of the wine in the mouth. Some people, however, still use the traditional term, "texture".
Mouthfeel is often related to a product's water activity, hard or crisp products having lower water activities and soft products having intermediate to high water activities.

'naddamean?