Foraging

 I've heard a common complaint among the Westerners at work that coming up with a strategy for dinner can be difficult; it all depends on what you are looking for. Luckily for us, lunch is free in our cafeteria. The first day I ate in the cafe was a Friday and I did what I find myself doing often, and stood off to the side to watch someone else go through the drill. There was a counter with women behind it putting food on plates, assembly line style, and our employees would just walk p and grb a plate. Then off to the soup line which had two choices and some fresh fruit. Then they went and sat down.

I scanned the room for a cashier. Nothing. Was there a separate exit through which you were charged? Nope. People seemed to just eat and go. There must be some high tech mechanism. Do you scan your badge somewhere? Not that I can see. Maybe my office chair has a strain gauge in it and at the end of the month I get billed based on my weight.I grab a plate, you have 2 choices of a set meal and it tends to be a mix of Asian/Western. Like a chili-garlic chicken breast, or teryaki salisbury steak. After eating I followed someone out, no option to pay. I was embarassed to ask anyone, as if it is free, I don't want to be the one to suggest that someone would be willing to pay for it, and potentially ruin it for everyone else. Maybe the boss forgot to install the cash register in the master plan.

So I waited until Monday and asked a colleague which whom I can confide who replied, "Yes Mike, there is such a thing as a free lunch!"

So, what to do for dinner in Taiwan?

My goal is to never go to McDonald's unless I'm legitimately craving Chicken McNuggets, assuming they even have them here. If the menu at McDonald's vs. the USA is anything like Starbucks vs. the USA, I may be missing out at McDonalds as I've found the food at Starbucks in Taiwan and Japan to be much better, though they no longer have the Raspberry Crepes they did a few years ago. So here are some approaches that I've taken since I've been here:

• If you go out with a local and you like a particular dish, have them write stuff down in Chinese or grab a take out menu and translate over the top. You can later come back on your own and use your written translation.

• Restaurants that have an English name out front like, "Mango Tango", probably have Enlish notes on the menu and there are probably a few employees with decent English skills.

• There are a lot of Vietnamese/Pho places. If there is not an English menu, there will at least be a Vietnamese menu. If you never imagined that you could read a Vietnamese menu, such things will seem quite simple once you are struggling through traditional Chinese as Vietnames is at least romanized so you can read the words. Look up a Vietnames menu online and you can write down about 15 vocabulary words to get you through the menu. Beef/Pork/Chicken/Shrimp/Crab - Rice/Noodle/Soup is about all you need to know to get a great meal at pretty cheap prices.

• Photo Menus - there will be a lot of places with photo menus; this saved us in Japan. It can be a challenge to tell what you are really looking at, especially in a bowl of soup or if something is breaded/fried like Tonkatsu, which is popular here. If you are feeling slightly brave, just point and eat.

• Street Food - Taiwan is well known for its street food. In the evening, propane fueled carts roll out to the street side and crank out some amazing food at rock bottom prices. Pho looks like an extravagance compared to cart food. In Japan it is considered bad ettiquitte to stroll the streets eating food but it Taiwan there is no such rule, not even remotely. Here's the problem with street food: the cart vendors typically don't speak a lick of English, and it can be quite difficult to tell what they are cooking. I once ordered something that at first glance looked like grilled chicken on a stick and the guy was basting it with a teriyaki sauce. I ordered one and in looking at the price ($1) was thinking, even in Taiwan, no way can chicken breast be THAT cheap. I am pretty confident it turned out to be Tofu, but I'll never know for sure. Dumplings are very good as long as you ar enot too concerned what is inside them. Pork, chicken and vegetarian seem common and I haven't run across anything exotic at the dumpling stands. So, speaking of exotic...there will be many stands containing grilled, basted, umm...innards, I guess? One of the guys at work has a "food survival guide" of sorts and he explained that there is a Chinese character that is a predecessor for anything that includes innards, so once you learn that character, you can be on the lookout. I inadvertenly had pig's feet and intestine in Japan, both of which were quite good, neither of which I would have ordered voluntarily.

• Traditional Taiwanese Restaurants - this is a big challenge so far. Local restaurants typically do not have English menus nor English speaking staff and if you want to have a nice, cool, sit down meal, you will have to learn to navigate these waters. A guy on the train taught me to say in Chinese, "I'll take your best dish". He said to call the boss over and ask for "the best" if I don't know what to order. I'm still a bit untrusting to do this, maybe, only because if I'm the boss and a Westerner strolled in and did this, I'd be tempted to see what I could get this poor sucker to eat. So, I'm hoping to get some help from folks at work in both written and spoken Chinese to be able to navigate the menu a little. I think this is the one thing that will force me to study some written language rather than just spoken. One option is if there is a local place by you, grab a take out menu and bring it in to work to be translated, then go back with your personal menu in tow.

• Buffet - there are some nice buffets here and this can be an easier way to get mroe traditional local food without dealing with Chinese. Some charge by the weight if it's more of a cafeteria style place but there are also some nice restaurants where you can pay one price andit's all-you-can-eat. Some of these are stashed away on the second floor of a mixed use building so ask the locals or check guide books to find out where they are.

• If you really get stuck there is also KFC and Pizza Hut in most high traffic areas and you can seek out a TGI Fridays or Outback steakhouse for something better.

I wonder what vegans, vegetarians or people who avoid pork and/or shellfish do. That can't be easy. I did eat at a place called Minder Vegetarian in the Taipei Main Station that was very good, buffet style. Any other vegetarian recommendations would be highly appreciated.

As for prices, at the local place by my temporary home, a combo fried rice (chicken/shrimp/pork) goes for $2.20. A big tofu egg drop soup meant for two is $1.90 and a Taiwanese snack that I love, scallion pancake, is $1.90 or $2.50 if you want it made with roast beef, which was awesome.

At the Vietnamese restaurant near the office, we usually end up paying less than $10 each for many plates to share including spring rolls, salad, soup and stir fry.

At a fancy Thai place in downtown Taipei, rice, seafood stir-fry, lemongrass iced tea and a beer was $21 including tip.

My experience is tipping is not customary in Taiwan except at fancier restaurants where they automatically add 10% to the bill. So you can just pay whatever it says on the bill and you are good to go. Prices include tax. The guy on the train said it is much cheaper to eat out than it is to buy food an cook yourself. Having no real cooking supplies here, I haven't crossed that bridge yet. There is an open air market right outside the door of our permanent apartment so I am looking forward to moving there, getting our kitchen stuff shipped over, and cooking with locally bought ingredients rather than big box supermarkets back home that ship everything in from South America.

I also notice a lot of Shabu-Shabu and Mongolian Grill type places which will be great to try once Shirley arrives or if I can get a group to go out but doesn't work well dining solo.

Hygeine can be an issue that you will have to get used to. I have eaten in some really dingy looking places and have yet to see a cockroach, which I did see at a really nice restaurant. Right now, I am writing this at Starbucks and am watching a monster cucaracha sitting on top of an empty chair across the aise. There are 4 people in close proximity, I'm wondering who will notice it first...if anyone.

Meeting other ex-pats through blog

I have been contacted by a few people through my blog with questions and comments. It was particularly rewarding to get an e-mail from a couple who is basically in the same boat as us, a couple months behind us in the process and also from CT. She is an actuary and he is in education so there is even some similarity in careers, and they have a cat.

They were in Taipei on a house hunting venture before they start the transition in August so we met up for dinner. Food can still be tough for me here; I am trying to strike a balance between the easy way out (McDonald's) and navigating a restaurant entirely in Chinese. So what's the middle ground? I had found in Japan that you can often find places with photos on the menus, that doesn't mean you won't end up with pig feet, tongue and intestines (as I think I did-all were good), but you will at least be able to get some protein on the table. You can also search around for menus with English subtitles, the availability of which seem dependent on location, neighborhoods with more foreign business travelers will be easier. Neihu is a little challenging in that sense.

Folks at work recommended the Breeze Center on the second floor of Taipei Main Station which ranges from food court to decent sit-down restaurants. It is also appears to be segregated by food types: Indian/pita/kebab type stuff in this corner, noodle stuff in that corner, Japanese together, etc. We ended up at a Japanese tonkatsu style place with a very strange sign on the front door, the least strange of which is you apparently can't bring cats, but dogs are OK? If anyone can explain the ban on astronaut bulls you win a prize.

Department store basements and train station areas tend to be easier to get by in English; we ended up with a picture menu and the staff was actually pretty good in English. It was fun to have other ex-pats to share similar stories with. They are struggling a bit more with finding a place. They were focused on living downtown and the spaces seem to be quite small there. Hopefully things work out!

Eating out - cracking the code

I worked with a Russian guy back in the States who upon learning about my move commented regarding the language barrier, that my survival skills would kick in and the first situation I would be forced to resolve, be it verbally or non-verbally, is finding food. It can be intimidating and the problem here is pointing is risky, as you often cannot tell what something is.

Cooking for yourself is easier. Yeah, there are some meat looking products at the store that are hard to identify, but you can make your way through it. I'm not really well equipped to cook in this hotel-style apartment with a small kitchen and I haven't even had my Slap Chop shipped from home, yet. So I have been trying to eat out in between cooking up some ramen.

On the way back from the MRT the other day I noticed a restaurant that had some dishes on a shelf looking like you could just pick whatever you want so I thought that would be a good spot to try, knowing that I am not in a touristy area and English menus are hard to come by. I walked over to the place after work. Most of the restaurants here would be perceived as quite "sketchy" back in the states just based on appearance and cleanliness. You quickly get over that here, otherwise, you will starve to death.

There are 3 odors I find prevalent in Taipei:

1. Carbon monoxide fumes
2. Smell of food cooking at the street side carts - part soy sauce smell, part cooking oil smell
3. Rotting corpse

They eat something called "stinky tofu", the likes of which I haven't tried yet. I am told that stinky tofu is the source of the rotting corpse smell. I still haven't accepted that someone will stick that in their mouth and there is not, in fact, a rotting corpse nearby.

Luckily, the little restaurant by me does not smell like rotting corpse so I slipped in and took a seat. The mama-san came by and gave me a slip of paper on a clipboard with a pen. It was much like the menu at a sushi bar when they hand you a pencil and have you fill it out yourself, except that it was all in Chinese. If you're not familiar with Chinese, there is the traditional written language with fancy characters, aka "kanji". Then there is a version which is "romanized" or translated into what to us is normal letters, this is known as pin yin. Unfortunately for us Westerners, it is not widely used which makes it much more difficult to get your grips on the language. If you take any Spanish/French/Italian class, you can get through menus in much of Europe, or you can at least re-recognize a word once you've figured out what it means. Even in Dutch and German, once I order it, I can later recall the word even though it isn't a romance language.

So when they says, "it's Chinese to me", that's how I felt looking at this menu that was meaningless, except I could make out what the prices are because they use Arabic numbers. There was a dotted line separating the top section from the bottom section and the prices on the top were less than the bottom. I figured the top might be appetizers and the bottom, main dishes. I also looked at the prices and know that a meal in this place can run about $4 per person so I decided to pick the first item from "column A" and the first from "column B". They added up to four bucks so I was hoping that was the correct quantity of food.

The items on the shelf appear to be cold side dishes and I saw some people grab them on the way in. There was also a self-serve drink cooler with some soda, beer and bottled water and tea. Nobody here appears to drink anything. I think that is because bottled beverages are relatively expensive, compared to the food.

In only a few minutes mama-san brought me a scallion pancake and a combo fried rice. Score! Scallion pancake is awesome and I don't know that I've ever had it outside of Taiwan. I thought about grabbing one of the items off the shelf but this ended up being the perfect amount of food. So now that I love the food at this place, I'm figuring out a plan to decipher the menu. 

I'm not sure the mama-san will let me take the ordering paper home as it has a carbon copy backing and she saves them all and I don't want to break any of the rules and get blacklisted. Now that I know what item #1 from each column are, I will likely venture to item #2. I'll bring a pen and paper and start redrawing the menu and translate as I order each item. I wonder if I will be able to get through the entire menu in 3 weeks. I feel like I'm trying to crack Kryptos.

I left this place with a real sense of accomplishment. Especially since the food was so good, and cheap. At the end of the meal, mama-san was asking me a question while pointing at the bill, first item 1, then item 2. I thought she was trying to say the amount of money I gave her didn't cover both but after she returned my change, I determined she was asking which I liked better.

I subsequently added "han hou che" to my vocab which I could have said, meaning "very good eat" and is something common to say in approval of the meal. I'll use that next time so she doesn't think my opinion was so-so, quite the contrary.

CT farewell tour stop #2: Merritt Canteen

The CT farewell tour continued this weekend with a trip to the Merritt Canteen. Almost as controversial as pizza in CT is the hot dog. Travelling along any major artery in the state will yield roadside hot dog stands one after the other, and once you choose sides, loyalty is expected. Don't get me wrong, I have dined at other decent hot dog joints, Swanky Franks, Super Duper Weenie, the Greeks, but my heart lies in the Canteen.

I grew up not far from here and worked across the street at Pathmark Supermarket and probably ate here 5 nights a week for the good part of two years of my life. They say, "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" and in retrospect, I am surprised that I survived my "regular" order:

• 2 cheese dogs with bacon
• Mozzarella sticks
• Grilled cheese sandwich with bacon

All 2500 calories (?) of which I was able to put down in a 15 minute break. Oh, to be 16 again...

In some ways the Canteen has stayed true to its heritage and in other changes leave me yearning for the good old days.

The good:

• The hot dogs taste the same as they did 30 years ago. The dogs are natural casing mix of beef/pork. I think they are deep fried in lard and then grilled to order. The chili is the same recipe and is crazy hot
• Whole belly clams are still served in season
• They make a cheese dog by frying a piece of cheese on the grill and then putting it on the dog. I've tried this myself an there is a narrow window of opportunity where the cheese is cooked just enough but not too much.
• There's something good about the breading in the mozzarella sticks. It's a little bit thicker than normal and they served them before the trend caught on.
• There's a method to the ordering system that exposes the locals vs. the out-of-towners. 
• No credit cards accepted.
• They've always had a cheesy arcade game in the corner. It's now a crane game. It may have been a crane game for quite some time.
• The bathroom looks like a great place to commit a murder. I'm not saying that murder is great, but it's great that the food is so good that the risk of being murdered in the bathroom is worth it.
• It is kinda dingy inside with terribly uncomfortable tables and because it's small and the door is always opening and closing, it can be pretty cold in the winter

The bad:

• They have an ATM machine on site. This removes one barrier to entry at the Canteen, you used to have to go find a bank, or perhaps rob the place
• They have a website. In the old days, much of the good stuff wasn't even on the menu
• They changed French fries. They used to serve a thicker, longer crinkle cut and now are a bit on the skinny side, still crinkle cut though.
• They have a more diverse menu with items that are actually healthy, like salads.
• They painted the place
• There aren't as many shady characters roaming around the parking lot as there used to be

This was planned as our last visit to the Canteen. I wonder if the sausages at the Shilin Night Market will serve as a worthy substitute. I think so.

My brother ate at the Merritt Canteen almost every day until he turned vegetarian around age 15. I've been trying to think of a clever message in that fact. While I haven't come up with anything, I don't think such a message would be used in a commercial for the Merritt Canteen.

taiwanderyears.blogspot.com

Holy Grail of Pizza

"When you know your time in a place is running out, you try to fix such moments in your mind's eye." -Julia Child, My Life in France

I've started thinking about what things I should do or see before leaving Connecticut, like a one last time "bucket list" of experiences that will not be available in Taiwan. Much of this revolves around food. In CT, pizza is like a religous experience.

Perhaps the most famous of the New Haven pizza joints is Pepe's. There's also Sally's and Modern and you have to choose sides. I am a Pepe's guy and this was high on my list of must dos before leaving. There are two buildings @ Pepe's, the newer building known as "Pepe's" and the original building known as "The Spot". Both serve the same pizza. The line @ Pepe's was easily two hours as we waited over an hour to get into The Spot. For pizza.

I'm starting to get that feeling regarding leaving for Taiwan. Eating food, going places, seeing people. What used to be routine now has a sense of finality about it. There's a bit of surrealness to it. While it has potential to be depressing, the upside is that there will be substitues for all of this activity and the opportunity to fill these voids with completely new experiences is very exciting.

I wonder if I will ever eat a more memorable pizza.

taiwanderyears.blogspot.com