Shilin Night Market

I said I would write about the night market that Ivy took me to on Friday night, and then more things kept happening and time stubbornly refused to stop so I could write it all down. But I'm finally getting around to it.

At 7:30, I met Ivy at the Jiantan station, and we walked across the street to a flat building that takes up almost an entire block. It's on the way between the station and the apartment, and for the first couple of days I'd taken it for some kind of parking garage, or maybe there was a small sports field inside. During the day it was dark inside and hard to tell just from looking through the entrances on the corners. Now it was brightly lit. It was dark outside, but inside you couldn't tell. Giant fluorescent light bulbs hung in rows over seething grills and vats of boiling oil. The closest analog in the States that I can think of is the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia, where stands selling different kinds of food fill up a warehouse-sized building. But this was ten times louder, hotter, and more crowded. And maybe most imposing of all were the smells; in particular, the pungent, semi-rotten smell of "stinky tofu" seemed to follow us no matter where we went.

One of the things that struck me most about the market was that everybody seemed to know what they wanted. There wasn't a lot of aimless browsing. Actually, casual browsing becomes pretty difficult when vendors start to lean out of their booths and wave big laminated menus in your face as you walk by. It also might be a product of the consistency of the fare; everyone who isn't a complete neophyte like me knows what to expect. Pretty soon after we walked inside, Ivy negotiated with a woman who showed us to a table in a little seating area a couple of stalls down from the one that was making our food. Then the first two dishes arrived.

"Oyster Omelet" is more of a plate of runny yellow and white stuff embedded with half-cooked oysters than an omelet. It's topped with a sweet, bright reddish sauce. Despite how it sounds, it's actually pretty good, although I think I might have to eat it a few more times before I acquire a taste for it (like a lot of foods here). The gooeyness is the most daunting part. Ivy said that her friend's British boyfriend had tried it and said that it tasted like snot. I don't know about that, but it certainly looked and felt like snot. Grandma Phyllis or Grandpa Jerry, if you're reading this--don't worry, I'm pretty sure I didn't get hepatitis.

The other item was called "Squid Thick Soup". Indeed, the soup was basically a thick, starchy proto-chowder with giant slabs of squid meat, and big slices of carrot and bamboo. The squid and vegetables didn't have a lot of flavor by themselves, and I found myself dipping them in the oyster omelet sauce.





When we were finished, we went around the corner for the next dish, Stinky Tofu. As I said, the smell of Stinky Tofu was everywhere. It's kind of a rancid, garlicky smell that's hard to compare to anything I've smelled before. It's not quite food, and it's not quite trash. We passed one stand with a group of tables, at one of which was a man with a bowl of the tofu in brown sauce. He was actually holding his nose while he lifted pieces of tofu to his mouth, but when he noticed me staring at him, he gave a thumbs up and grinned. "Zhen de ma? (really?)" I asked. "It's great!" was his reply in West Coast American English. We sat down at the table next to him and his friend. The man was actually Japanese, but he'd spent five years growing up in California. He had come to Taiwan on a business trip. When the waitress came, the man recommended trying the "raw" tofu that he'd been inflicting on himself, but I decided deep-fried would be safer. Soon a bowl was served with a pile of what looked like relatively innocuous fried tofu, with a sprinkling of sweet and sour cabbage and shaved carrots. Still, one smell was enough to confirm the special quality of this dish. As I said, the taste sits somewhere in the grey area between robust and offensive--it's hard to pin down exactly where. Once or twice I was almost convinced that the only thing remarkable about the tofu was an inordinate amount of garlic, but then a wave of fermentation flavor would send me reeling. I think I ate 3 pieces and finished the cole slaw.





Needing something to wash out the foul taste, I was glad when we went to a juice stand. I had kumquat juice, which was extremely tart but also sweet. Ivy had aloe juice with honey, and little pieces of aloe floating in it.

At the next place, we were going to order Eel Noodles, but we were both pretty full and left the noodles out. Actually, the eel isn't even eel--it's just a particularly long fish. What we received was a plate of sauteed onions, scallions, and chili peppers in spicy brownish-red sauce, and some small black pieces of fish on top. The fish didn't have much flavor, but the onions and sauce were delicious and very spicy. The woman who served us leaned against the wall a few feet away and watched us while we ate.

After that, we left the "food court" building. The streets at this point were crowded, and not far away was a long alley overtaken by shops, stalls, and pedestrians. In one shop there were just rows of crane game machines. A lot of them contained Sponge Bob dolls. One machine that caught my eye seemed to be filled with nothing but toast. Ivy told me the toast was fake.

One clothing shop that's pretty common is called NET. Everything about the logo and store facade are exactly the same as a GAP, except that it's not a GAP, it's a NET [insert pun here about a NET loss].

We turned down an even narrower alley and went into a place advertising itself (roughly) as the most famous shaved ice restaurant in Shilin Night Market. Near the entrance, there were several of what looked a lot like Gyro cones--the metal contraptions that are somehow surrounded by a cylinder of meat, which the cooks shave slices from as they spin--but these were covered with frozen milk. The frozen milk was shaved extremely thin, and the result is like a long, thin, delicate sheet of snow folded into a pyramid. Mine came with red bean on the side.