Central Taiwan Food & Traditional Cuisine

Central Taiwanese food divides between the plain and the mountains, and it has produced two things the rest of the world now knows.

On the plain, Taichung is a baking and snack city. It gave Taiwan the suncake, the pineapple-cake industry and a cafe culture that is genuinely serious, and it invented bubble tea — tapioca pearls in sweetened milk tea — in the 1980s.

In the mountains, the cooking is indigenous and quite different from Han Taiwanese food: millet rather than rice, wild vegetables and ferns, freshwater fish, game, bamboo-tube rice, and preservation by salting and fermenting. Bunun and Tsou communities serve it at homestays, and it is worth seeking out.

Running through both is tea, which here is not a drink so much as an industry, a landscape and a subject of expertise.

The western plain also supplies much of the island’s rice, fruit and vegetables, so produce is excellent and cheap.

Bubble tea — zhenzhu naicha — belongs here before anywhere else. The classic is black tea, milk, sugar and chewy tapioca pearls, shaken and drunk through a wide straw, and Taichung has two tea houses that each claim to have invented it in the 1980s.

Sun cakes, taiyang bing, are Taichung’s own pastry: flaky layered rounds with a soft maltose filling, sold in boxes as the standard gift to bring back from the city.

Tea eggs and tea-smoked dishes appear everywhere, and around Sun Moon Lake the local assam black tea, planted by the Japanese, is used in cooking as well as drunk.

Bamboo-tube rice — glutinous rice steamed inside a length of green bamboo and split open at the table — is the classic indigenous dish, served with wild boar sausage and mountain greens.

Also: Chiayi’s turkey rice, shredded turkey over rice with a savoury sauce, which is the city’s defining dish; Lukang’s oyster omelettes and shrimp monkey snacks; and mushroom hotpot from the Nantou farms.

Fengjia night market in Taichung is the largest in Taiwan and is a genuine student and local market rather than a tourist one — it is also where new bubble tea and snack formats tend to appear first, which is a real function of the place.

Second Market in Taichung is the old covered market, with stalls that have been there for generations selling noodles, rice cakes and mackerel rice from before dawn.

Tea houses are central to the region. At the mountain farms, tasting is done in the gongfu style — small pot, many short infusions, the same leaves opening over an hour — and the farmer will walk you through the grades. It is unhurried and it is how tea is bought here.

Lukang’s old street is a food destination in itself, with shops making the same snacks they have made for a century.

Indigenous homestays around Sun Moon Lake and in the Bunun valleys serve set meals of mountain vegetables and grilled meat, usually eaten communally.

Central Taiwan is where the island’s drink traditions are strongest, though grape wine is a minor part of it.

Puli in Nantou is the centre. The town’s spring water is famously soft and it built a distilling and brewing industry on it: the Puli Winery produces Shaoxing rice wine that is regarded as Taiwan’s best, and the site is open to visitors with tastings and a museum. Shaoxing here is a cooking wine and a drinking one, and the town sells everything from the ice cream to the sausages flavoured with it.

Millet wine is the indigenous tradition, brewed by Bunun, Tsou and Thao communities for ritual and celebration, sweet and cloudy and low in alcohol.

A small grape wine industry does exist around Houli and Erlin on the plain, where Black Queen and Golden Muscat are grown and vinified.

And the non-alcoholic tradition dominates everything: this is the heartland of Taiwanese tea, and a serious oolong deserves more attention than most of the wine.