Taipei night markets, ranked honestly, and what to order at each
The Taipei night market is not an attraction with food in it. It is dinner. Taiwanese people eat here on a Tuesday because it is cheap, fast and good, and the first adjustment a visitor needs to make is to arrive hungry rather than to arrive fed.
The second adjustment is to stop trying to see the whole market. A night market is not a museum. You walk it once at pace, you note the four stalls with queues of local people, and then you go back and eat at those.
This is our honest ranking of the Taipei markets, what each is for, and the specific things to order.
How to eat a night market
Go at seven, not nine. Most stalls open from around five or six and the best ones sell out. Nine o’clock is the crowd and the leftovers.
Follow the queue of office workers. High turnover means the ingredients have not been sitting, and a stall with fifteen locals waiting is a better bet than an empty stall with a photographic English menu.
Order small and often. One item per stall, shared between two, across six or seven stalls. Nobody eats a full portion of anything here.
Carry cash in small notes. Most stalls do not take cards, though some now take local mobile payment.
Eat standing or walking, and put the rubbish in the bin at the stall. Taipei is fastidious about this.
Do not order the sit-down set meal at the front of the market. That is what visitors do who have not walked the lane yet.
The markets, in the order we would send you
Raohe Street, our first choice
Songshan, one straight covered lane, about 600 yards (550 m) long, with a temple at one end. It is compact, it is a proper local market, and the quality per yard is the highest in the city.
What to order. The black pepper bun, hujiao bing, at the stall by the temple entrance: minced pork and spring onion in a bread shell slapped onto the wall of a clay oven and pulled off blistered. You will see the queue. It is the single best thing to eat in a Taipei night market and it is worth the fifteen minutes.
Then medicinal pork rib soup, a clear broth with herbs and a rib that falls apart. Then stinky tofu, which is fermented and deep fried and served with pickled cabbage, and which is genuinely better than it smells, though only just, and this is the market to try it in. Then taro balls, or a bowl of douhua, soft tofu pudding with peanuts and syrup.
Ningxia, the best for classic Taiwanese dishes
Datong, small, one short lane, and the most concentrated collection of old-school Taipei cooking in the city. Many of the stalls are two and three generations old.
What to order. Oyster omelette, o-a-tsian, a wobbly sweet potato starch omelette with small oysters and a sweet red sauce, which is the dish of the Taiwanese night market. Then taro cake, sesame oil chicken soup, and the fried taro-wrapped egg roll. Then a bowl of lu rou fan, braised pork over rice, which is the great cheap plate of this island and costs a dollar and a half.
Shilin, famous and not the best
The biggest and the one every guide names. It has a large underground food court, a great many clothing stalls, and prices about twenty percent above the others.
It is not bad. It is the market that has been most reshaped by visitors, and if you have three nights in Taipei we would spend them at Raohe, Ningxia and one of the two below instead. If you go, go for the giant fried chicken cutlet, which is the size of a face and is best eaten sitting on a step, and the pepper bun, though Raohe’s is better.
Tonghua, also called Linjiang, the local one
Da’an, south of the Xinyi district. Fewer visitors, shorter lane, and the place where Taipei residents actually shop for dinner on a weeknight.
What to order. Gua bao, the steamed folded bun with braised pork belly, pickled mustard greens, coriander and crushed peanut, which the Western world adopted twenty years ago and which is better here. Then hot pot skewers, grilled squid, and mochi.
Gongguan, the student market
Near National Taiwan University. Cheapest of the lot, youngest crowd, best for bubble tea and for the fried things eaten at eleven at night. Bubble tea was invented in Taichung in the 1980s and it is a genuine national obsession rather than an export invention.
Huaxi Street, worth knowing about
Wanhua, near Longshan Temple. Historically it was called Snake Alley and it is now a quiet covered arcade with a handful of serious old restaurants doing tainan-style dishes and herbal soups. Not a night out. A good early dinner before Longshan Temple at dusk, when it is a working temple full of people praying rather than a sight.
The dishes, in order of what we would put in front of a first-timer
- Pepper bun, hujiao bing. Raohe. Non-negotiable.
- Oyster omelette. Ningxia. The dish that defines the genre.
- Lu rou fan. Everywhere. A dollar and a half.
- Gua bao. Tonghua.
- Beef noodle soup. Not really a night market dish. It is the national dish, argued about the way ramen is in Japan, and it belongs to a lunch shop. Five to eight dollars.
- Stinky tofu. Once. With the pickled cabbage.
- Sweet potato balls and taro balls. The dessert.
- Douhua. The other dessert.
- Grilled squid, scallion pancake, oyster vermicelli. The fillers, all good.
- Bubble tea. Ask for less sugar. The default is very sweet.
What is overrated, honestly
Shilin as a destination. Covered above.
The novelty stalls. Ice cream in a two-foot spiral, drinks in light bulbs, anything sold primarily because it photographs. They are not why the market exists.
The giant fried chicken cutlet as a meal. Half of one, shared, is a good idea. A whole one ends the evening.
The seafood restaurants at the front of Shilin with tanks and no prices. Ask the price first. This is the one place in Taipei where we have seen visitors surprised by a bill.
Eating a night market in the rain in December. Taipei from late October gets the north-east monsoon and can be grey and drizzly for days at around 63F (17C). Raohe and Ningxia are covered, which is a reason to prefer them in winter.
Beyond the night market
Taipei is not only a street food city and we would give one of three evenings to something else.
Xiaolongbao at one of the serious houses, where the soup dumpling is a technical exercise and worth watching being folded. $12 to $20 a head.
Modern Taiwanese, which is now a real restaurant scene: island ingredients with technique, at $50 to $110 a head. Our partner team in Taiwan books these, because the good rooms are small and take reservations in Mandarin. Taiwan is not one of our own offices, which we say on every page: ours are in Japan, Vietnam, India and the Philippines, and Taiwan runs through a Taiwanese partner we have worked with for years.
Tea. Maokong, up the gondola from the city, for Tieguanyin in a tea house on the hillside, or a proper tasting with a farmer at Pinglin, which takes two hours and is one of the best things we book.
Breakfast. The Taiwanese breakfast shop is an institution: soy milk hot or cold, sweet or savoury, with youtiao, shaobing and turnip cake. It costs two dollars and almost no visitor finds it without being told.
If Taipei is where you learn to eat in Taiwan, Tainan is where you find out how far it goes. We make that case in Tainan in two days.
Plan this trip
Tell us how much of your Taiwan trip should be about the eating and a specialist will build the days and the districts around it, with the small tables booked. Free first outline, no obligation.
Keep reading
- Taiwan: the complete guide to planning your trip
- Tainan in two days
- Taiwan food and culture in 12 days
- What does a trip to Taiwan really cost?
- Eating in Osaka
- All our Taiwan trips
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