Dining out in Taipei has become increasingly diverse in recent years, and in the residential district surrounding Yungkang Park, there is something for everyone.
Before the day's first light, while most people are still asleep, Taiwan's many breakfast-shop owners have left their beds to prepare an eclectic range of dishes: soybean milk, steamed buns with or without stuffing, fried pastries, eggs, ice tea, sandwiches and hamburgers, and even noodles. By the time they start closing at around noon, it is time for yet more restaurants to start setting the tables for lunch and dinner. And hours later, while most people are asleep, still another segment of the population is working in front of the stoves to make sure hungry night owls are fed.
Day and night, the streets of Taiwan are lined with restaurants offering everything from local Taiwanese dishes and mainland Chinese provincial cuisines to dishes from continental Europe. And the island's breakfast menus are as good an indication as any of how various people's diets have become. For instance, the mainstay of breakfast shops and vendors in earlier days--buns, deep-fried breadsticks eaten with hot soymilk--introduced by mainlanders from China half a century back, are giving way to sandwiches and hamburgers.
Taipei's Yungkang community, for example, epitomizes the nation's changing eating habits. The narrow streets and many allies surrounding Yungkang Park are popular places to find antiques, bric-a-brac, and imports. But few people would visit the area without sampling one of its restaurants--whether it be Taiwanese, Chinese, Japanese, Thai or any other of a host of cuisines that have happily taken root there.
Indeed there is so much variety, it is difficult to imagine that many novelties only came to Taiwan a little over a decade ago. Before that, with the exception of Japanese cuisine--which had long cornered the market for splash-out cuisine--non-local Asian food was Cantonese dim sum and Korean hotpot. Western cuisine was largely limited to McDonald's and hotel-restaurant French and Italian.
Those days are long gone, with a host of foreign cuisines having taken root in Taiwan over the past decade. Thai cuisine led the way, and was soon followed by Italian pastas and pizzas, and now even Greek and German have attracted a steady following. And fusion cuisines are picking up as a result of the marriage between local and foreign culinary techniques.
"Economic prosperity and travel are the main reasons that people have become more open-minded about trying exotic cuisines," says Clara Hung, manager of the Mykonos Taverna, a Greek restaurant in the Yungkang neighborhood. "Moreover, the government holds gourmet-food exhibits from time to time, which also helps stimulate people's taste for new things."
Mykonos, a pioneer in authentic ethnic cuisine, opened 10 years ago with four tables and a number of loyal customers from Taipei's international community. "Everything here--the space, the food, the music, the beer and wine--is strictly Greek," says Lola Peng, who also manages the restaurant. "We import all our ingredients from Greece to ensure that our preparation is authentic. We don't adapt the food to Taiwanese tastes. Instead, we try to give diners a total Greek experience. Taiwanese are largely more used to American food, but many who try our cuisine come back."
Meanwhile, next door, a new pizza place, Alleycat's, has become a hit among the foreign community. South African Alan S. Pontes, after spending time in the UK and the US, came to Taiwan at the invitation of a friend. Later, he made a brick oven in a basement, and transformed the basement into a place where "people come to relax and have good food."
Pizza restaurants are ubiquitous in Taipei, with chains such as Pizza Hut and Domino's flooding primetime TV with upbeat advertising campaigns, but Pontes' aim is to make the real thing. Rejecting the idea of using frozen crusts, Pontes makes his pizzas himself--from the dough to the various toppings.
"A lot of things here have been localized in the same way Chinese food is localized in the US or South Africa for Western customers," he says, adding that once people have experienced the real thing, there will be a market for it.
Pontes, to drive his point home, says that he likes the Cantonese dish, sanbao fan, noting that many of the restaurants that offer it are humble but remain popular because of the quality of the food. He says that is how he would like his business to be: "I make something simple and good, and people will come."
Nearby is the four-year-old Oma Ursel's Cafe-Restaurant. Qiu Daiyu, who is married to a German national, learned to appreciate the cuisine while living in Germany. When she returned to Taiwan, she experimented with numerous dishes, inspired by her husband's nostalgia for his hometown cuisine.
"German cuisine exhibits a lot of variety, and flavors vary from place to place," she says. "But most people in Taiwan only know the famous leg of pork dish, schweinshaxe ." Qiu says she has to make minor adjustments to the food, such as cutting down on salt and sweets, but other than that, she tries to be faithful to the original German recipes.
Foreign diners make up around one third of Qiu's customer base, while the rest are locals. "Most of our customers are largely between the ages of 25 and 40," she says, adding that her homemade German bread and cakes are increasingly in great demand.
Mykonos's Hung says that foreign cuisine is positively influencing local cooking, pointing out that the younger generation is becoming more aware that Taiwanese food is often overcooked and thus less nutritious. "Naturally, outside influences contribute to the increasing variety of foods, and people are now more willing to experiment."
"The waves of immigrants from mainland China around 1949 helped enrich Taiwanese food and open people's minds to new ideas," says Hu Hsiao-chen, owner of Hui Liu, a vegetarian restaurant next to Yungkang Park. In subsequent decades, Chinese provincial cuisines dominated the dining scene, enjoying popularity until the old chefs gradually passed away, along with the older generations of the mainlander population. The Yungkang area mirrors the public's changing taste, with regional Chinese cuisines (an exception is the famous Shanghainese dumpling house Dintaifung) crowded out by less traditional options such as restaurants that cater to health conscious diners. Hui Liu, which evolved from a teashop to a vegetarian restaurant, has proven to be a bellwether for those seeking to provide healthy, environmentally sound meals. "What I care about is the relationship between food and people, between people and space, and between people and the land that nurtures them," Hu says. Hui Liu uses organic vegetables and tries to preserve the original taste of the vegetables by not overcooking them and by reducing the amount of seasonings.
"Once you liberate yourself from the dependence on seasonings--oil, sugar, and salt--you realize that your palate can be independent and you can start all over again," she says. "You can enjoy the process of eating dishes, and you know what you're taking in will be good for your body. You know that you are cared for. That's really the pleasure of dining."
During her 10 years in business, Hu has observed that people's notions about food have changed a lot. "It's as if everything is now possible," Hu says. New ideas about healthy food have given rise to many restaurants; some even serve meals enriched with Chinese medicine. But Hu says those restaurants are on a different path than the one Hui Liu is taking.
"We do what we do out of a love for the land," she says, adding that Hui Liu is not so much about fitness, but about promoting a lifestyle in which food and the environment where it is consumed complement each other.