🕷️ Crawler Inspector

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Raw Queries and Responses

1. Shard Calculation

Query:

Response:

Calculated Shard: 76 (from laksa136)

2. Crawled Status Check

Query:

curl -X POST \
  'http://laksa076.int.ahrefs:8124/' \
  -H 'Content-Type: text/plain' \
  -H 'X-ClickHouse-Database: crawler3' \
  -H 'Authorization: Basic YXBpOg==' \
  -d 'SELECT getAhrefsURLFromUnparsed(src_unparsed) AS found_url, ifNull(toUnixTimestamp(download_stamp), 0) AS crawl_time, ifNull(toUnixTimestamp(props_url_first_seen), 0) AS first_indexed_time, download_http_code AS http_code, src_unparsed AS src_unparsed, src_root_hash AS src_root_hash, history_drop_reason AS history_drop_reason, meta_title AS meta_title, meta_descriptions AS meta_descriptions, attrs_boilerpipe_text AS attrs_boilerpipe_text, attrs_markdown AS attrs_markdown, attrs_readable_markdown AS attrs_readable_markdown, meta_canonical AS meta_canonical FROM crawler3.page_info_local FINAL PREWHERE (src_root_hash, src_unparsed) IN ((getAhrefsRootHashFromUnparsed(getAhrefsUnparsedNoserviceFromURL(\'https://popula.com/2019/02/13/living-to-eat-in-taiwan/\')), getAhrefsUnparsedNoserviceFromURL(\'https://popula.com/2019/02/13/living-to-eat-in-taiwan/\'))) FORMAT JSONEachRow'

Response:

{"found_url":"https:\/\/popula.com\/2019\/02\/13\/living-to-eat-in-taiwan\/","crawl_time":1775662977,"first_indexed_time":1550090480,"http_code":200,"src_unparsed":"com,popula!\/2019\/02\/13\/living-to-eat-in-taiwan\/ s443","src_root_hash":"11281658375819874476","history_drop_reason":null,"meta_title":"Living to Eat in Taiwan – Popula","meta_descriptions":[],"attrs_boilerpipe_text":"Brian Hioe\nThe best chance for a restaurateur in Taiwan is to be good-looking, win some kind of international competition, and also have switched careers to pursue a driving passion involving food.\nPublished on\nFeb 13, 2019 3:30PM EST\nBrian Hioe is a freelance translator, a writer on social movements and youth culture in Asia, and founding editor at\nNew Bloom Magazine.\nSee more\nIt’s become popular all over the world, in recent years, to take photos of what you eat and post them on social media. Some people religiously take photos of everything they eat, keep food diaries, or go to restaurants specifically to post pictures. As someone who tends not to care about what they eat, so long as it’s filling and keeps me alive, it’s always been a bit hard for me to understand the extreme fixation of Taiwanese culture on food (which is nothing new; it’s a traditional greeting in Taiwanese for someone to ask if you’ve  eaten yet—Jiă bà buāi? or 吃飽了嗎?, literally “Have you eaten yet?”—though it’s not as common among young people now.)\nIt’s hardly unique to Taiwan that local watering holes or restaurants become famous for certain dishes.  But Taiwan seems to take it to extremes, with each city or town having its own local specialties, and tasting all of them an absolute requirement for visitors. This tendency is so pronounced that traveling to other parts of Taiwan on vacation often feels like a nonstop process of wandering from place to place with local friends to try every local food and drink recommendation—hours and hours of walking around local markets, or from restaurant to restaurant. Such places often offer a trademark specialty, or\nzhaopai\n(招牌), which is sometimes a sampler plate of the whole menu. And when you eat these specialties, you’ll of course post a picture of each one on social media.\nSuncakes from Taichung\nJeanHavoc [CC BY-SA 3.0] Wikimedia Commons\nThe list is endless:\nSuncakes\nin Taichung,\ncoffin bread\nand\ndanzai noodles\nin Tainan,*\nba-wan\nin Changhua,\na-geh\nin Tamsui. Or you might go for a special variation of a familiar Taiwanese dish, such as minced pork rice in southern Taiwan in place of the braised pork rice of northern Taiwan, the northern versus the southern variant of bawan, or the near-infinite varieties of zongzi. Everyone swears by his own favorite place.\nDifferent varieties of zongzi.\nHuang Wen-jun\nBa-wan, in the southern variation.\nTakoradee\/WikiCommons\/CC\nA-gei.\nSeasurger\/WikiCommons\/CC\nRegional varieties of rice paired with meat.\n文化銀行 Bank of Culture\nCoffee shops in Taiwan are now so prevalent, in Taipei at least, that one wonders how they all manage to survive—though admittedly many of them don’t. Competition is so fierce that Taipei’s coffee shops have to have some striking feature to distinguish themselves—\nodd chairs hanging from the ceiling like hammocks\n,\nlive llamas wandering around,\nbeing especially tiny, with room for just one seat\n. For many of these novelty places, once everyone has gone and taken a selfie there, business dries up.\nNew coffee shop\nBrian Hioe\nLaodian\nLaodian\nBrian Hioe\nLong-established\nrestaurants acquire a special status, the status of\nlaodian\n, literally “old store” (老店),\nwhich adds to their prestige. Any older town or region may also have an “old\nstreet” (老街), consisting\nprimarily of laodian restaurants or other old shops.\nSome old, historic\ncoffee shops are thought of as laodian. The newer ones have chic interiors, but\nthe run-down, even dirty interior of a laodian has its own kind of appeal as a\nmarker of authenticity, and of a long history.\nModern coffee in Taipei\nBrian Hioe\nFew of the Taiwanese\ncoffee shops out there will last long enough to become\nlaodian\n. The over-saturation of the market suggests that it’s only\na matter of time before a coffee shop apocalypse wipes out the majority of them.\nMany a handwringing thinkpiece has wondered why so many young people—\nparticularly Taiwanese “wenqing”,\nsometimes\ntranslated as “hipsters”—seem so intent on opening up coffee shops;\ndespairing baby boomers seem upset at the thought that\nyoung people have no higher ambitions.\nI’ve also heard that young\npeople want to start businesses, but in an age lacking economic opportunities,\na coffee shop seems like a reasonably profitable option.\nWhether it’s a\nhigh-groove coffee shop or a classic laodian, a key element of success, it\nseems, is the ability to sell the story behind the store. As we’ve noted,\nsometimes the story is the chance to post a weird photo or a regional dish on\nsocial media. But sometimes the story is about the patrons, or the owners. I\nwent with a friend recently to\na Taipei-based southern Taiwanese cuisine restaurant\npopular with Tsai Ing-wen, the current president, in her college days. Even after\nbecoming a senior government official, she apparently continued to hold\nmeetings there with her colleagues. Youth activists were fond of going to\nA-Cai’s Restaurant\n—a rechao,\na form of Taiwanese restaurant serving cheap stir-fried\nfood with drink\n—that was famous because dissident journalists and\npolitical activists frequented it during the authoritarian period.\nWell-known public\nfigures in Taiwan such as actors, directors, or even politicians cash in their\ncultural capital by opening restaurants. Fans might show up trying to catch a\nglimpse of them—heck, I admit I’ve done that too, for example, hoping to catch\na glimpse of\ndirector Tsai Ming-liang at the coffee shop he used to\nown.\nThere’s a whole\nmicro-genre of news about restaurateurs and shop owners caught on camera and becoming\n well-known simply because they are\nattractive; even the largest media outlets in Taiwan, such as the\nLiberty Times\n,\nApple Daily\n, and\nUnited Daily\nNews\n, trade at times in this kind of tabloid fare. This genre features both\nmen and women—\nusually the latter, given the open misogyny of mainstream\nmedia outlets in Taiwan\n—and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that it\nhad led to stalking incidents, though you don’t hear about them in the\nnews. \nLess disturbingly,\nthere are stories of those who left respectable professions for the food world:\nThe professor who gave it all up for a fried chicken\nstand,\nor\nthe electronics industry worker who opened a pizza store.\nAnd there’s the store owner who wins some kind of international culinary competition—\nbaking bread\n, say, or\npastry\nart.\nAfter winning prestige for Taiwan on the world stage—something\nTaiwan is always desperately in search of, given its marginalization from the\ninternational community—they come back to Taiwan to open a restaurant to which people\nwill flock, out of a sense of nothing less than national pride.\nThe best chance for\na restaurateur in Taiwan is to be good-looking, win some kind of international\ncompetition, and also have switched careers to pursue a driving passion\ninvolving food.\nThere have even been\nmovies made about such individuals,\nsuch as the biopic of baker Wu Pao-chun,\nwho\nwon the 2010 Bakery Masters contest held in Paris, which touted him as an\nemblem of Taiwanese identity.\nAfter\nWu stated pro-unification views, likely hoping for access to the larger and\nmore lucrative Chinese bread market, his fame became somewhat controversial\n.\nBefore I chanced upon this movie on television one day, I had no idea that\nmaking bread could be so dramatic. Which I guess is to be expected for someone\nlacking any real sense of taste, and who eats food only to survive.\n*\nCorrection: an earlier version mistakenly identified coffin bread as a specialty of   Chiayi; it is a specialty of Tainan. We regret the error.\nAfter the Beef\nStephen Kearse\nPublished on\nMay 15, 2024 2:47PM EDT\nThe Flint Water Crisis, Ten Years Later\nTyler Sonnichsen\nA Conversation with Dayne Walling, Flint Mayor 2009-2015\nPublished on\nApr 25, 2024 1:00PM EDT","attrs_markdown":"[Go check out FLAMING HYDRA\\!](https:\/\/flaminghydra.com\/)\n\n[Skip to content](https:\/\/popula.com\/2019\/02\/13\/living-to-eat-in-taiwan\/#content)\n\n[![Popula]()](https:\/\/popula.com\/)\n\n- [My Airport](https:\/\/popula.com\/category\/my-airport\/)\n- [ME TODAY](https:\/\/popula.com\/category\/me-today\/)\n- [Columns](https:\/\/popula.com\/columns\/)\n- [My Dictator](https:\/\/popula.com\/category\/my-dictator\/)\n- [COMICS](https:\/\/popula.com\/category\/comics\/)\n- [The Western](https:\/\/popula.com\/category\/the-western\/)\n- [Radio Sermon with Brother Layne](https:\/\/popula.com\/category\/radio-sermon-with-brother-layne\/)\n- [Things Unseen](https:\/\/popula.com\/category\/things-unseen\/)\n- [Still Mad](https:\/\/popula.com\/category\/still-mad\/)\n- [Wiki-Epistemology](https:\/\/popula.com\/category\/wiki-epistemology\/)\n- [Ingredients](https:\/\/popula.com\/category\/ingredients\/)\n- [Tour of Babel](https:\/\/popula.com\/category\/tour-of-babel\/)\n- [Jack Pendarvis](https:\/\/popula.com\/category\/jack-pendarvis\/)\n- [Oeconoclast](https:\/\/popula.com\/category\/oeconoclast\/)\n- [As the World Turns](https:\/\/popula.com\/category\/as-the-world-turns\/)\n- [Tempo: August 31, 2018](https:\/\/popula.com\/tempo\/august-31-2018\/)\n- [Premonitions](https:\/\/popula.com\/category\/premonitions\/)\n- [Minutes](https:\/\/popula.com\/category\/minutes\/)\n- [The Next Big Thing](https:\/\/popula.com\/category\/next-big-thing\/)\n- [Fact Check](https:\/\/popula.com\/category\/fact-check\/)\n- [Nevada City Wine Diaries](https:\/\/popula.com\/category\/nevada-city-wine-diaries\/)\n- [Letters to the Editor](https:\/\/popula.com\/category\/letter-to-the-editor\/)\n- [Sunday Funnies](https:\/\/popula.com\/category\/sunday-funnies\/)\n- [Guest Posts](https:\/\/popula.com\/category\/guest-posts\/)\n\nSearch\n\n[Subscribe]()\n\nNewsroom Navigation\n\n![]()\n\nBrian Hioe\n\n# Living to Eat in Taiwan\nThe best chance for a restaurateur in Taiwan is to be good-looking, win some kind of international competition, and also have switched careers to pursue a driving passion involving food.\n\nPublished on Feb 13, 2019 3:30PM EST\n\n[![](https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&r=g) Brian Hioe](https:\/\/popula.com\/2019\/02\/13\/living-to-eat-in-taiwan\/#bio-link-384)  [@brianhioe](https:\/\/twitter.com\/brianhioe)\n\nBrian Hioe is a freelance translator, a writer on social movements and youth culture in Asia, and founding editor at *New Bloom Magazine.*\n\n[See more](https:\/\/popula.com\/author\/brian-hioe\/)\n\n### Share this:\n- [Email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email](mailto:?subject=%5BShared%20Post%5D%20Living%20to%20Eat%20in%20Taiwan&body=https%3A%2F%2Fpopula.com%2F2019%2F02%2F13%2Fliving-to-eat-in-taiwan%2F&share=email)\n- [Share on X (Opens in new window) X](https:\/\/popula.com\/2019\/02\/13\/living-to-eat-in-taiwan\/?share=twitter)\n- [Share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit](https:\/\/popula.com\/2019\/02\/13\/living-to-eat-in-taiwan\/?share=reddit)\n\nIt’s become popular all over the world, in recent years, to take photos of what you eat and post them on social media. Some people religiously take photos of everything they eat, keep food diaries, or go to restaurants specifically to post pictures. As someone who tends not to care about what they eat, so long as it’s filling and keeps me alive, it’s always been a bit hard for me to understand the extreme fixation of Taiwanese culture on food (which is nothing new; it’s a traditional greeting in Taiwanese for someone to ask if you’ve eaten yet—Jiă bà buāi? or 吃飽了嗎?, literally “Have you eaten yet?”—though it’s not as common among young people now.)\n\nIt’s hardly unique to Taiwan that local watering holes or restaurants become famous for certain dishes. But Taiwan seems to take it to extremes, with each city or town having its own local specialties, and tasting all of them an absolute requirement for visitors. This tendency is so pronounced that traveling to other parts of Taiwan on vacation often feels like a nonstop process of wandering from place to place with local friends to try every local food and drink recommendation—hours and hours of walking around local markets, or from restaurant to restaurant. Such places often offer a trademark specialty, or *zhaopai* (招牌), which is sometimes a sampler plate of the whole menu. And when you eat these specialties, you’ll of course post a picture of each one on social media.\n\n![](https:\/\/popula.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/brian7-816x612.jpg)\n\nSuncakes from Taichung\n\nJeanHavoc \\[CC BY-SA 3.0\\] Wikimedia Commons\n\nThe list is endless: [Suncakes](https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Suncake_\\(Taiwan\\)) in Taichung, [coffin bread](https:\/\/www.saveur.com\/g00\/taiwanese-coffin-bread-pot-pie?i10c.ua=1&i10c.encReferrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8%3D&i10c.dv=17) and [danzai noodles](https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ta-a_noodles) in Tainan,\\* [ba-wan](https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ba-wan) in Changhua, [a-geh](https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/A-gei) in Tamsui. Or you might go for a special variation of a familiar Taiwanese dish, such as minced pork rice in southern Taiwan in place of the braised pork rice of northern Taiwan, the northern versus the southern variant of bawan, or the near-infinite varieties of zongzi. Everyone swears by his own favorite place.\n\n![](https:\/\/popula.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/brian10-652x612.png)\n\nDifferent varieties of zongzi.\n\nHuang Wen-jun\n\n![](https:\/\/popula.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/brian8-816x612.jpg)\n\nBa-wan, in the southern variation.\n\nTakoradee\/WikiCommons\/CC\n\n![](https:\/\/popula.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/brian9-816x612.png)\n\nA-gei.\n\nSeasurger\/WikiCommons\/CC\n\n![](https:\/\/popula.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/brianmap-382x612.png)\n\nRegional varieties of rice paired with meat.\n\n文化銀行 Bank of Culture\n\nCoffee shops in Taiwan are now so prevalent, in Taipei at least, that one wonders how they all manage to survive—though admittedly many of them don’t. Competition is so fierce that Taipei’s coffee shops have to have some striking feature to distinguish themselves—[odd chairs hanging from the ceiling like hammocks](https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/wengucafe), [live llamas wandering around,](https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/oiacafe\/) [being especially tiny, with room for just one seat](https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/yixialonetogether\/). For many of these novelty places, once everyone has gone and taken a selfie there, business dries up.\n\n![](https:\/\/popula.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/brian5-816x612.jpg)\n\nNew coffee shop\n\nBrian Hioe\n\n![](https:\/\/popula.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/brian3-816x612.png)\n\nLaodian\n\n![](https:\/\/popula.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/brian1-816x612.png)\n\nLaodian\n\nBrian Hioe\n\nLong-established restaurants acquire a special status, the status of *laodian*, literally “old store” (老店), which adds to their prestige. Any older town or region may also have an “old street” (老街), consisting primarily of laodian restaurants or other old shops.\n\nSome old, historic coffee shops are thought of as laodian. The newer ones have chic interiors, but the run-down, even dirty interior of a laodian has its own kind of appeal as a marker of authenticity, and of a long history.\n\n![](https:\/\/popula.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/brian4-816x612.jpg)\n\nModern coffee in Taipei\n\nBrian Hioe\n\nFew of the Taiwanese coffee shops out there will last long enough to become *laodian*. The over-saturation of the market suggests that it’s only a matter of time before a coffee shop apocalypse wipes out the majority of them. Many a handwringing thinkpiece has wondered why so many young people—[particularly Taiwanese “wenqing”,](https:\/\/popula.com\/2019\/01\/10\/in-defense-of-wenqing-%E6%96%87%E9%9D%92\/) sometimes translated as “hipsters”—seem so intent on opening up coffee shops; [despairing baby boomers seem upset at the thought that young people have no higher ambitions.](https:\/\/www.npr.org\/sections\/parallels\/2015\/12\/08\/458131681\/taiwans-strawberry-generation-reaches-out-to-the-young-and-trendy) I’ve also heard that young people want to start businesses, but in an age lacking economic opportunities, a coffee shop seems like a reasonably profitable option.\n\nWhether it’s a high-groove coffee shop or a classic laodian, a key element of success, it seems, is the ability to sell the story behind the store. As we’ve noted, sometimes the story is the chance to post a weird photo or a regional dish on social media. But sometimes the story is about the patrons, or the owners. I went with a friend recently to [a Taipei-based southern Taiwanese cuisine restaurant](https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/pages\/%E7%94%B0%E5%9C%92%E5%8F%B0%E8%8F%9C%E6%B5%B7%E9%AE%AE\/205358369487352) popular with Tsai Ing-wen, the current president, in her college days. Even after becoming a senior government official, she apparently continued to hold meetings there with her colleagues. Youth activists were fond of going to [A-Cai’s Restaurant](http:\/\/www.taipeitimes.com\/News\/taiwan\/archives\/2012\/04\/09\/2003529896)—a rechao, [a form of Taiwanese restaurant serving cheap stir-fried food with drink](https:\/\/asia.nikkei.com\/Life-Arts\/Life\/Taiwanese-cuisine-s-delicious-secret-set-to-emerge)—that was famous because dissident journalists and political activists frequented it during the authoritarian period.\n\nWell-known public figures in Taiwan such as actors, directors, or even politicians cash in their cultural capital by opening restaurants. Fans might show up trying to catch a glimpse of them—heck, I admit I’ve done that too, for example, hoping to catch a glimpse of [director Tsai Ming-liang at the coffee shop he used to own.](https:\/\/www.filmcommission.taipei\/en\/MessageNotice\/NewsDet\/1948)\n\nThere’s a whole micro-genre of news about restaurateurs and shop owners caught on camera and becoming well-known simply because they are attractive; even the largest media outlets in Taiwan, such as the *Liberty Times*, *Apple Daily*, and *United Daily News*, trade at times in this kind of tabloid fare. This genre features both men and women—[usually the latter, given the open misogyny of mainstream media outlets in Taiwan](https:\/\/newbloommag.net\/2017\/03\/20\/taiwanese-media-misogyny\/)—and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that it had led to stalking incidents, though you don’t hear about them in the news.\n\nLess disturbingly, there are stories of those who left respectable professions for the food world: [The professor who gave it all up for a fried chicken stand,](https:\/\/tw.appledaily.com\/headline\/daily\/20130310\/34878500\/) or [the electronics industry worker who opened a pizza store.](https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=8Ytwq8xRnws) And there’s the store owner who wins some kind of international culinary competition—[baking bread](https:\/\/guide.michelin.com\/sg\/people\/chef-spotlight-master-baker-wu-pao-chun\/news), say, or [pastry art.](https:\/\/www.taiwannews.com.tw\/en\/news\/3586539) After winning prestige for Taiwan on the world stage—something Taiwan is always desperately in search of, given its marginalization from the international community—they come back to Taiwan to open a restaurant to which people will flock, out of a sense of nothing less than national pride.\n\nThe best chance for a restaurateur in Taiwan is to be good-looking, win some kind of international competition, and also have switched careers to pursue a driving passion involving food.\n\nThere have even been movies made about such individuals, [such as the biopic of baker Wu Pao-chun,](https:\/\/zh.wikipedia.org\/zh-tw\/%E4%B8%96%E7%95%8C%E7%AC%AC%E4%B8%80%E2%BF%BA%E9%BA%A5%E6%96%B9) who won the 2010 Bakery Masters contest held in Paris, which touted him as an emblem of Taiwanese identity. [After Wu stated pro-unification views, likely hoping for access to the larger and more lucrative Chinese bread market, his fame became somewhat controversial](https:\/\/www.taiwannews.com.tw\/en\/news\/3593863). Before I chanced upon this movie on television one day, I had no idea that making bread could be so dramatic. Which I guess is to be expected for someone lacking any real sense of taste, and who eats food only to survive.\n***\n\\**Correction: an earlier version mistakenly identified coffin bread as a specialty of Chiayi; it is a specialty of Tainan. We regret the error.*\n\n## What Next\n- ### [Wuhan, Italy](https:\/\/popula.com\/2020\/03\/24\/my-father-watches-the-news-all-day\/ \"Wuhan, Italy\")\n  - [Mattia Salvia](https:\/\/popula.com\/author\/mattia-salvia\/)\n  \n  Published on Mar 24, 2020 12:00PM EDT\n- ### [All-in on the Triple Red Hot Ultra Stack Dragon](https:\/\/popula.com\/2019\/10\/14\/all-in-on-the-triple-red-hot-ultra-stack-dragon\/ \"All-in on the Triple Red Hot Ultra Stack Dragon\")\n  - [Simone Scriven](https:\/\/popula.com\/author\/simone-haysom\/)\n  \n  Published on Oct 14, 2019 10:00AM EDT\n- ### [BIRD LOVE](https:\/\/popula.com\/2020\/09\/16\/bird-love\/ \"BIRD LOVE\")\n  - [Ina Kim](https:\/\/popula.com\/author\/ina-kim\/)\n  \n  Published on Sep 16, 2020 1:00PM EDT\n- ### [The wisdom of never leaving your hotel room](https:\/\/popula.com\/2019\/08\/05\/the-wisdom-of-never-leaving-your-hotel-room\/ \"The wisdom of never leaving your hotel room\")\n  - [Yonatan Raz Portugali](https:\/\/popula.com\/author\/yonatan-raz-portugali\/)\n  \n  Published on Aug 5, 2019 3:00PM EDT\n- ### [A hot dog at Nathan’s](https:\/\/popula.com\/2020\/03\/06\/a-hot-dog-at-nathans\/ \"A hot dog at Nathan’s\")\n  - [Elizabeth Litvitskiy](https:\/\/popula.com\/author\/elizabeth-litvitskiy\/)\n  \n  Published on Mar 6, 2020 11:00AM EST\n- ### [My Dictator: Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov](https:\/\/popula.com\/2023\/01\/23\/my-dictator-gurbanguly-berdimuhamedov\/ \"My Dictator: Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov\")\n  - [Jackie Charniga](https:\/\/popula.com\/author\/jacqueline-charniga\/)\n  \n  Published on Jan 23, 2023 1:16PM EST\n- ### [Nazis and the layers of shame](https:\/\/popula.com\/2019\/02\/06\/nazis-and-the-layers-of-shame\/ \"Nazis and the layers of shame\")\n  - [Danuta Hinc](https:\/\/popula.com\/author\/danuta-hinc\/)\n  \n  Published on Feb 6, 2019 2:30PM EST\n- ### [Time Machine of Indian Cinema: Sarkari Shorts](https:\/\/popula.com\/2019\/08\/27\/time-machine-of-indian-cinema-sarkari-shorts\/ \"Time Machine of Indian Cinema: Sarkari Shorts\")\n  - [Soham Gadre](https:\/\/popula.com\/author\/soham-gadre\/)\n  \n  Published on Aug 27, 2019 9:00AM EDT\n- ### [THE WORST THING WE READ THIS WEEK: Why Is the New York Times So Obsessed With Trans Kids?](https:\/\/popula.com\/2023\/01\/29\/the-worst-thing-we-read-this-week-why-is-the-new-york-times-so-obsessed-with-trans-kids\/ \"THE WORST THING WE READ THIS WEEK: Why Is the New York Times So Obsessed With Trans Kids?\")\n  - [Tom Scocca](https:\/\/popula.com\/author\/tom\/)\n  \n  Published on Jan 29, 2023 5:28PM EST\n- ### [America’s First Plane Bomber, and His Intended Victim](https:\/\/popula.com\/2023\/04\/05\/americas-first-plane-bomber-and-his-intended-victim\/ \"America’s First Plane Bomber, and His Intended Victim\")\n  - [Nathan Munn](https:\/\/popula.com\/author\/nathan-munn\/)\n  \n  Published on Apr 5, 2023 6:00AM EDT\n\n### Share this:\n- [Email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email](mailto:?subject=%5BShared%20Post%5D%20Living%20to%20Eat%20in%20Taiwan&body=https%3A%2F%2Fpopula.com%2F2019%2F02%2F13%2Fliving-to-eat-in-taiwan%2F&share=email)\n- [Share on X (Opens in new window) X](https:\/\/popula.com\/2019\/02\/13\/living-to-eat-in-taiwan\/?share=twitter)\n- [Share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit](https:\/\/popula.com\/2019\/02\/13\/living-to-eat-in-taiwan\/?share=reddit)\n\nBrian Hioe  [@brianhioe](https:\/\/twitter.com\/brianhioe)\n\nBrian Hioe is a freelance translator, a writer on social movements and youth culture in Asia, and founding editor at *New Bloom Magazine.*\n\n[See more](https:\/\/popula.com\/author\/brian-hioe\/)\n\n### Tags:\n- [FOOD](https:\/\/popula.com\/tag\/food\/)\n- [social media](https:\/\/popula.com\/tag\/social-media\/)\n- [TAIWAN](https:\/\/popula.com\/tag\/taiwan\/)\n- [tourism](https:\/\/popula.com\/tag\/tourism\/)\n\n***\n[![Support Us](https:\/\/i1.wp.com\/popula.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/asset__support-us-button.png?ssl=1)](https:\/\/flaminghydra.com\/)\n\nPopula is 100% ad-free, reader-supported journalism accountable only to you. Every dollar of your subscription goes straight to our work. Presently, we’re working on a brand new website for fearless on-fire writing called [FLAMING HYDRA](https:\/\/flaminghydra.com\/). Thank you for supporting us.\n\n## [The Smallness of Mark Zuckerberg](https:\/\/popula.com\/2024\/05\/29\/the-smallness-of-mark-zuckerberg\/ \"The Smallness of Mark Zuckerberg\")\n- [![]() Maria Bustillos](https:\/\/popula.com\/author\/maria-bustillos\/)\n\nPublished on May 29, 2024 10:53PM EDT\n\n[![]()](https:\/\/popula.com\/2024\/05\/29\/the-smallness-of-mark-zuckerberg\/ \"The Smallness of Mark Zuckerberg\")\n\n## [After the Beef](https:\/\/popula.com\/2024\/05\/15\/after-the-beef\/ \"After the Beef\")\n- [![](https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&r=g) Stephen Kearse](https:\/\/popula.com\/author\/stephen-kearse\/)\n\nPublished on May 15, 2024 2:47PM EDT\n\n[![]()](https:\/\/popula.com\/2024\/05\/15\/after-the-beef\/ \"After the Beef\")\n\n## [The Flint Water Crisis, Ten Years Later](https:\/\/popula.com\/2024\/04\/25\/the-flint-water-crisis-ten-years-later\/ \"The Flint Water Crisis, Ten Years Later\")\n- [![](https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&r=g) Tyler Sonnichsen](https:\/\/popula.com\/author\/tyler-sonnichsen\/)\n\nA Conversation with Dayne Walling, Flint Mayor 2009-2015\n\nPublished on Apr 25, 2024 1:00PM EDT\n\n[![]()](https:\/\/popula.com\/2024\/04\/25\/the-flint-water-crisis-ten-years-later\/ \"The Flint Water Crisis, Ten Years Later\")\n\nWhat is Popula?\n\nPopula is a journalist-owned, journalist-run, ad-free publication with stories sourced from writers all over the world.\n\n[Tell Me More\\!](https:\/\/popula.com\/about-popula\/)\n\nKeep Me Posted\\!\n\nReceive weekly word of new stories, comics, and surprises from the Popula Publishing Partners\\!\n\n[Sign Me Up](https:\/\/popula.com\/welcome-to-popula\/)\n\nI Love It\\!\n\nSupport Popula and HELP KEEP US FREE\\!\n\n[Take My Money\\!](https:\/\/popula.com\/donate\/)\n\n[![Popula]()](https:\/\/popula.com\/)\n\n### Email • RSS • Search • Welcome\n- [Email](mailto:hey@popula.com)\n- [RSS](https:\/\/popula.com\/feed\/)\n- [Search](https:\/\/popula.com\/?s)\n- [Join](https:\/\/popula.com\/welcome-to-popula\/)\n\n### ‘Subscribe’ Button\n- [Nobody to answer to, except you.](https:\/\/popula.com\/thank-you\/)\n- [Subscribe](https:\/\/popula.com\/thank-you\/)\n\n### More from Civil:\n- [Sludge](https:\/\/readsludge.com\/)\n- [Block Club Chicago](https:\/\/blockclubchicago.org\/)\n- [Documented](https:\/\/documentedny.com\/)\n- [Cannabis Wire](http:\/\/cannabiswire.com\/)\n- [Hmm Daily](https:\/\/hmmdaily.com\/)\n\n### About Us\n- [Welcome](https:\/\/popula.com\/welcome-to-popula\/)\n- [Columns](https:\/\/popula.com\/columns\/)\n- [Search](https:\/\/popula.com\/?s=)\n- [FAQ](https:\/\/popula.com\/faq\/)\n- [Contact Us](https:\/\/popula.com\/contact-us\/)\n- [About Us](https:\/\/popula.com\/about-popula\/)\n- [Donate Crypto](https:\/\/commerce.coinbase.com\/checkout\/232d6c5c-462d-4e80-ab7f-b124995a221c)\n- [Help](https:\/\/popula.com\/help\/)\n- [In the News](https:\/\/popula.com\/popula-in-the-news\/)\n- [Shopula](https:\/\/shopula.popula.com\/)\n\n[Subscribe]()\n\n[Contact Us at hey@popula.com](mailto:hey@popula.com)\n\nCopyright © 2026 Popula\n\n- [About](https:\/\/civil.co\/about\/)\n- [Civil Constitution](https:\/\/civil.co\/constitution\/)\n- [FAQ](https:\/\/civil.co\/help\/#faq)\n\n- [Have a Problem?](https:\/\/civil.co\/help\/)\n\n[Contact Civil](https:\/\/civil.co\/contact\/)","attrs_readable_markdown":"![]()\n\nBrian Hioe\n\nThe best chance for a restaurateur in Taiwan is to be good-looking, win some kind of international competition, and also have switched careers to pursue a driving passion involving food.\n\nPublished on Feb 13, 2019 3:30PM EST\n\nBrian Hioe is a freelance translator, a writer on social movements and youth culture in Asia, and founding editor at *New Bloom Magazine.* [See more](https:\/\/popula.com\/author\/brian-hioe\/)\n\nIt’s become popular all over the world, in recent years, to take photos of what you eat and post them on social media. Some people religiously take photos of everything they eat, keep food diaries, or go to restaurants specifically to post pictures. As someone who tends not to care about what they eat, so long as it’s filling and keeps me alive, it’s always been a bit hard for me to understand the extreme fixation of Taiwanese culture on food (which is nothing new; it’s a traditional greeting in Taiwanese for someone to ask if you’ve eaten yet—Jiă bà buāi? or 吃飽了嗎?, literally “Have you eaten yet?”—though it’s not as common among young people now.)\n\nIt’s hardly unique to Taiwan that local watering holes or restaurants become famous for certain dishes. But Taiwan seems to take it to extremes, with each city or town having its own local specialties, and tasting all of them an absolute requirement for visitors. This tendency is so pronounced that traveling to other parts of Taiwan on vacation often feels like a nonstop process of wandering from place to place with local friends to try every local food and drink recommendation—hours and hours of walking around local markets, or from restaurant to restaurant. Such places often offer a trademark specialty, or *zhaopai* (招牌), which is sometimes a sampler plate of the whole menu. And when you eat these specialties, you’ll of course post a picture of each one on social media.\n\n![](https:\/\/popula.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/brian7-816x612.jpg)\n\nSuncakes from Taichung\n\nJeanHavoc \\[CC BY-SA 3.0\\] Wikimedia Commons\n\nThe list is endless: [Suncakes](https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Suncake_\\(Taiwan\\)) in Taichung, [coffin bread](https:\/\/www.saveur.com\/g00\/taiwanese-coffin-bread-pot-pie?i10c.ua=1&i10c.encReferrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8%3D&i10c.dv=17) and [danzai noodles](https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ta-a_noodles) in Tainan,\\* [ba-wan](https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ba-wan) in Changhua, [a-geh](https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/A-gei) in Tamsui. Or you might go for a special variation of a familiar Taiwanese dish, such as minced pork rice in southern Taiwan in place of the braised pork rice of northern Taiwan, the northern versus the southern variant of bawan, or the near-infinite varieties of zongzi. Everyone swears by his own favorite place.\n\n![](https:\/\/popula.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/brian10-652x612.png)\n\nDifferent varieties of zongzi.\n\nHuang Wen-jun\n\n![](https:\/\/popula.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/brian8-816x612.jpg)\n\nBa-wan, in the southern variation.\n\nTakoradee\/WikiCommons\/CC\n\n![](https:\/\/popula.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/brian9-816x612.png)\n\nA-gei.\n\nSeasurger\/WikiCommons\/CC\n\n![](https:\/\/popula.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/brianmap-382x612.png)\n\nRegional varieties of rice paired with meat.\n\n文化銀行 Bank of Culture\n\nCoffee shops in Taiwan are now so prevalent, in Taipei at least, that one wonders how they all manage to survive—though admittedly many of them don’t. Competition is so fierce that Taipei’s coffee shops have to have some striking feature to distinguish themselves—[odd chairs hanging from the ceiling like hammocks](https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/wengucafe), [live llamas wandering around,](https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/oiacafe\/) [being especially tiny, with room for just one seat](https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/yixialonetogether\/). For many of these novelty places, once everyone has gone and taken a selfie there, business dries up.\n\n![](https:\/\/popula.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/brian5-816x612.jpg)\n\nNew coffee shop\n\nBrian Hioe\n\n![](https:\/\/popula.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/brian3-816x612.png)\n\nLaodian\n\n![](https:\/\/popula.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/brian1-816x612.png)\n\nLaodian\n\nBrian Hioe\n\nLong-established restaurants acquire a special status, the status of *laodian*, literally “old store” (老店), which adds to their prestige. Any older town or region may also have an “old street” (老街), consisting primarily of laodian restaurants or other old shops.\n\nSome old, historic coffee shops are thought of as laodian. The newer ones have chic interiors, but the run-down, even dirty interior of a laodian has its own kind of appeal as a marker of authenticity, and of a long history.\n\n![](https:\/\/popula.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/brian4-816x612.jpg)\n\nModern coffee in Taipei\n\nBrian Hioe\n\nFew of the Taiwanese coffee shops out there will last long enough to become *laodian*. The over-saturation of the market suggests that it’s only a matter of time before a coffee shop apocalypse wipes out the majority of them. Many a handwringing thinkpiece has wondered why so many young people—[particularly Taiwanese “wenqing”,](https:\/\/popula.com\/2019\/01\/10\/in-defense-of-wenqing-%E6%96%87%E9%9D%92\/) sometimes translated as “hipsters”—seem so intent on opening up coffee shops; [despairing baby boomers seem upset at the thought that young people have no higher ambitions.](https:\/\/www.npr.org\/sections\/parallels\/2015\/12\/08\/458131681\/taiwans-strawberry-generation-reaches-out-to-the-young-and-trendy) I’ve also heard that young people want to start businesses, but in an age lacking economic opportunities, a coffee shop seems like a reasonably profitable option.\n\nWhether it’s a high-groove coffee shop or a classic laodian, a key element of success, it seems, is the ability to sell the story behind the store. As we’ve noted, sometimes the story is the chance to post a weird photo or a regional dish on social media. But sometimes the story is about the patrons, or the owners. I went with a friend recently to [a Taipei-based southern Taiwanese cuisine restaurant](https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/pages\/%E7%94%B0%E5%9C%92%E5%8F%B0%E8%8F%9C%E6%B5%B7%E9%AE%AE\/205358369487352) popular with Tsai Ing-wen, the current president, in her college days. Even after becoming a senior government official, she apparently continued to hold meetings there with her colleagues. Youth activists were fond of going to [A-Cai’s Restaurant](http:\/\/www.taipeitimes.com\/News\/taiwan\/archives\/2012\/04\/09\/2003529896)—a rechao, [a form of Taiwanese restaurant serving cheap stir-fried food with drink](https:\/\/asia.nikkei.com\/Life-Arts\/Life\/Taiwanese-cuisine-s-delicious-secret-set-to-emerge)—that was famous because dissident journalists and political activists frequented it during the authoritarian period.\n\nWell-known public figures in Taiwan such as actors, directors, or even politicians cash in their cultural capital by opening restaurants. Fans might show up trying to catch a glimpse of them—heck, I admit I’ve done that too, for example, hoping to catch a glimpse of [director Tsai Ming-liang at the coffee shop he used to own.](https:\/\/www.filmcommission.taipei\/en\/MessageNotice\/NewsDet\/1948)\n\nThere’s a whole micro-genre of news about restaurateurs and shop owners caught on camera and becoming well-known simply because they are attractive; even the largest media outlets in Taiwan, such as the *Liberty Times*, *Apple Daily*, and *United Daily News*, trade at times in this kind of tabloid fare. This genre features both men and women—[usually the latter, given the open misogyny of mainstream media outlets in Taiwan](https:\/\/newbloommag.net\/2017\/03\/20\/taiwanese-media-misogyny\/)—and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that it had led to stalking incidents, though you don’t hear about them in the news.\n\nLess disturbingly, there are stories of those who left respectable professions for the food world: [The professor who gave it all up for a fried chicken stand,](https:\/\/tw.appledaily.com\/headline\/daily\/20130310\/34878500\/) or [the electronics industry worker who opened a pizza store.](https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=8Ytwq8xRnws) And there’s the store owner who wins some kind of international culinary competition—[baking bread](https:\/\/guide.michelin.com\/sg\/people\/chef-spotlight-master-baker-wu-pao-chun\/news), say, or [pastry art.](https:\/\/www.taiwannews.com.tw\/en\/news\/3586539) After winning prestige for Taiwan on the world stage—something Taiwan is always desperately in search of, given its marginalization from the international community—they come back to Taiwan to open a restaurant to which people will flock, out of a sense of nothing less than national pride.\n\nThe best chance for a restaurateur in Taiwan is to be good-looking, win some kind of international competition, and also have switched careers to pursue a driving passion involving food.\n\nThere have even been movies made about such individuals, [such as the biopic of baker Wu Pao-chun,](https:\/\/zh.wikipedia.org\/zh-tw\/%E4%B8%96%E7%95%8C%E7%AC%AC%E4%B8%80%E2%BF%BA%E9%BA%A5%E6%96%B9) who won the 2010 Bakery Masters contest held in Paris, which touted him as an emblem of Taiwanese identity. [After Wu stated pro-unification views, likely hoping for access to the larger and more lucrative Chinese bread market, his fame became somewhat controversial](https:\/\/www.taiwannews.com.tw\/en\/news\/3593863). Before I chanced upon this movie on television one day, I had no idea that making bread could be so dramatic. Which I guess is to be expected for someone lacking any real sense of taste, and who eats food only to survive.\n***\n\\**Correction: an earlier version mistakenly identified coffin bread as a specialty of Chiayi; it is a specialty of Tainan. We regret the error.*\n\n[![]()](https:\/\/popula.com\/2024\/05\/29\/the-smallness-of-mark-zuckerberg\/ \"The Smallness of Mark Zuckerberg\")\n\n## [After the Beef](https:\/\/popula.com\/2024\/05\/15\/after-the-beef\/ \"After the Beef\")\n- [![](https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&r=g) Stephen Kearse](https:\/\/popula.com\/author\/stephen-kearse\/)\n\nPublished on May 15, 2024 2:47PM EDT\n\n[![]()](https:\/\/popula.com\/2024\/05\/15\/after-the-beef\/ \"After the Beef\")\n\n## [The Flint Water Crisis, Ten Years Later](https:\/\/popula.com\/2024\/04\/25\/the-flint-water-crisis-ten-years-later\/ \"The Flint Water Crisis, Ten Years Later\")\n- [![](https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&r=g) Tyler Sonnichsen](https:\/\/popula.com\/author\/tyler-sonnichsen\/)\n\nA Conversation with Dayne Walling, Flint Mayor 2009-2015\n\nPublished on Apr 25, 2024 1:00PM EDT\n\n[![]()](https:\/\/popula.com\/2024\/04\/25\/the-flint-water-crisis-ten-years-later\/ \"The Flint Water Crisis, Ten Years Later\")","meta_canonical":null}

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Boilerpipe Text	Brian Hioe The best chance for a restaurateur in Taiwan is to be good-looking, win some kind of international competition, and also have switched careers to pursue a driving passion involving food. Published on Feb 13, 2019 3:30PM EST Brian Hioe is a freelance translator, a writer on social movements and youth culture in Asia, and founding editor at New Bloom Magazine. See more It’s become popular all over the world, in recent years, to take photos of what you eat and post them on social media. Some people religiously take photos of everything they eat, keep food diaries, or go to restaurants specifically to post pictures. As someone who tends not to care about what they eat, so long as it’s filling and keeps me alive, it’s always been a bit hard for me to understand the extreme fixation of Taiwanese culture on food (which is nothing new; it’s a traditional greeting in Taiwanese for someone to ask if you’ve eaten yet—Jiă bà buāi? or 吃飽了嗎?, literally “Have you eaten yet?”—though it’s not as common among young people now.) It’s hardly unique to Taiwan that local watering holes or restaurants become famous for certain dishes. But Taiwan seems to take it to extremes, with each city or town having its own local specialties, and tasting all of them an absolute requirement for visitors. This tendency is so pronounced that traveling to other parts of Taiwan on vacation often feels like a nonstop process of wandering from place to place with local friends to try every local food and drink recommendation—hours and hours of walking around local markets, or from restaurant to restaurant. Such places often offer a trademark specialty, or zhaopai (招牌), which is sometimes a sampler plate of the whole menu. And when you eat these specialties, you’ll of course post a picture of each one on social media. Suncakes from Taichung JeanHavoc [CC BY-SA 3.0] Wikimedia Commons The list is endless: Suncakes in Taichung, coffin bread and danzai noodles in Tainan,* ba-wan in Changhua, a-geh in Tamsui. Or you might go for a special variation of a familiar Taiwanese dish, such as minced pork rice in southern Taiwan in place of the braised pork rice of northern Taiwan, the northern versus the southern variant of bawan, or the near-infinite varieties of zongzi. Everyone swears by his own favorite place. Different varieties of zongzi. Huang Wen-jun Ba-wan, in the southern variation. Takoradee/WikiCommons/CC A-gei. Seasurger/WikiCommons/CC Regional varieties of rice paired with meat. 文化銀行 Bank of Culture Coffee shops in Taiwan are now so prevalent, in Taipei at least, that one wonders how they all manage to survive—though admittedly many of them don’t. Competition is so fierce that Taipei’s coffee shops have to have some striking feature to distinguish themselves— odd chairs hanging from the ceiling like hammocks , live llamas wandering around, being especially tiny, with room for just one seat . For many of these novelty places, once everyone has gone and taken a selfie there, business dries up. New coffee shop Brian Hioe Laodian Laodian Brian Hioe Long-established restaurants acquire a special status, the status of laodian , literally “old store” (老店), which adds to their prestige. Any older town or region may also have an “old street” (老街), consisting primarily of laodian restaurants or other old shops. Some old, historic coffee shops are thought of as laodian. The newer ones have chic interiors, but the run-down, even dirty interior of a laodian has its own kind of appeal as a marker of authenticity, and of a long history. Modern coffee in Taipei Brian Hioe Few of the Taiwanese coffee shops out there will last long enough to become laodian . The over-saturation of the market suggests that it’s only a matter of time before a coffee shop apocalypse wipes out the majority of them. Many a handwringing thinkpiece has wondered why so many young people— particularly Taiwanese “wenqing”, sometimes translated as “hipsters”—seem so intent on opening up coffee shops; despairing baby boomers seem upset at the thought that young people have no higher ambitions. I’ve also heard that young people want to start businesses, but in an age lacking economic opportunities, a coffee shop seems like a reasonably profitable option. Whether it’s a high-groove coffee shop or a classic laodian, a key element of success, it seems, is the ability to sell the story behind the store. As we’ve noted, sometimes the story is the chance to post a weird photo or a regional dish on social media. But sometimes the story is about the patrons, or the owners. I went with a friend recently to a Taipei-based southern Taiwanese cuisine restaurant popular with Tsai Ing-wen, the current president, in her college days. Even after becoming a senior government official, she apparently continued to hold meetings there with her colleagues. Youth activists were fond of going to A-Cai’s Restaurant —a rechao, a form of Taiwanese restaurant serving cheap stir-fried food with drink —that was famous because dissident journalists and political activists frequented it during the authoritarian period. Well-known public figures in Taiwan such as actors, directors, or even politicians cash in their cultural capital by opening restaurants. Fans might show up trying to catch a glimpse of them—heck, I admit I’ve done that too, for example, hoping to catch a glimpse of director Tsai Ming-liang at the coffee shop he used to own. There’s a whole micro-genre of news about restaurateurs and shop owners caught on camera and becoming well-known simply because they are attractive; even the largest media outlets in Taiwan, such as the Liberty Times , Apple Daily , and United Daily News , trade at times in this kind of tabloid fare. This genre features both men and women— usually the latter, given the open misogyny of mainstream media outlets in Taiwan —and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that it had led to stalking incidents, though you don’t hear about them in the news. Less disturbingly, there are stories of those who left respectable professions for the food world: The professor who gave it all up for a fried chicken stand, or the electronics industry worker who opened a pizza store. And there’s the store owner who wins some kind of international culinary competition— baking bread , say, or pastry art. After winning prestige for Taiwan on the world stage—something Taiwan is always desperately in search of, given its marginalization from the international community—they come back to Taiwan to open a restaurant to which people will flock, out of a sense of nothing less than national pride. The best chance for a restaurateur in Taiwan is to be good-looking, win some kind of international competition, and also have switched careers to pursue a driving passion involving food. There have even been movies made about such individuals, such as the biopic of baker Wu Pao-chun, who won the 2010 Bakery Masters contest held in Paris, which touted him as an emblem of Taiwanese identity. After Wu stated pro-unification views, likely hoping for access to the larger and more lucrative Chinese bread market, his fame became somewhat controversial . Before I chanced upon this movie on television one day, I had no idea that making bread could be so dramatic. Which I guess is to be expected for someone lacking any real sense of taste, and who eats food only to survive. * Correction: an earlier version mistakenly identified coffin bread as a specialty of Chiayi; it is a specialty of Tainan. We regret the error. After the Beef Stephen Kearse Published on May 15, 2024 2:47PM EDT The Flint Water Crisis, Ten Years Later Tyler Sonnichsen A Conversation with Dayne Walling, Flint Mayor 2009-2015 Published on Apr 25, 2024 1:00PM EDT
Markdown	[Go check out FLAMING HYDRA\!](https://flaminghydra.com/) [Skip to content](https://popula.com/2019/02/13/living-to-eat-in-taiwan/#content) [![Popula]()](https://popula.com/) - [My Airport](https://popula.com/category/my-airport/) - [ME TODAY](https://popula.com/category/me-today/) - [Columns](https://popula.com/columns/) - [My Dictator](https://popula.com/category/my-dictator/) - [COMICS](https://popula.com/category/comics/) - [The Western](https://popula.com/category/the-western/) - [Radio Sermon with Brother Layne](https://popula.com/category/radio-sermon-with-brother-layne/) - [Things Unseen](https://popula.com/category/things-unseen/) - [Still Mad](https://popula.com/category/still-mad/) - [Wiki-Epistemology](https://popula.com/category/wiki-epistemology/) - [Ingredients](https://popula.com/category/ingredients/) - [Tour of Babel](https://popula.com/category/tour-of-babel/) - [Jack Pendarvis](https://popula.com/category/jack-pendarvis/) - [Oeconoclast](https://popula.com/category/oeconoclast/) - [As the World Turns](https://popula.com/category/as-the-world-turns/) - [Tempo: August 31, 2018](https://popula.com/tempo/august-31-2018/) - [Premonitions](https://popula.com/category/premonitions/) - [Minutes](https://popula.com/category/minutes/) - [The Next Big Thing](https://popula.com/category/next-big-thing/) - [Fact Check](https://popula.com/category/fact-check/) - [Nevada City Wine Diaries](https://popula.com/category/nevada-city-wine-diaries/) - [Letters to the Editor](https://popula.com/category/letter-to-the-editor/) - [Sunday Funnies](https://popula.com/category/sunday-funnies/) - [Guest Posts](https://popula.com/category/guest-posts/) Search [Subscribe]() Newsroom Navigation ![]() Brian Hioe # Living to Eat in Taiwan The best chance for a restaurateur in Taiwan is to be good-looking, win some kind of international competition, and also have switched careers to pursue a driving passion involving food. Published on Feb 13, 2019 3:30PM EST [![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/?s=96&d=mm&r=g) Brian Hioe](https://popula.com/2019/02/13/living-to-eat-in-taiwan/#bio-link-384) [@brianhioe](https://twitter.com/brianhioe) Brian Hioe is a freelance translator, a writer on social movements and youth culture in Asia, and founding editor at New Bloom Magazine. [See more](https://popula.com/author/brian-hioe/) ### Share this: - [Email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email](mailto:?subject=%5BShared%20Post%5D%20Living%20to%20Eat%20in%20Taiwan&body=https%3A%2F%2Fpopula.com%2F2019%2F02%2F13%2Fliving-to-eat-in-taiwan%2F&share=email) - [Share on X (Opens in new window) X](https://popula.com/2019/02/13/living-to-eat-in-taiwan/?share=twitter) - [Share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit](https://popula.com/2019/02/13/living-to-eat-in-taiwan/?share=reddit) It’s become popular all over the world, in recent years, to take photos of what you eat and post them on social media. Some people religiously take photos of everything they eat, keep food diaries, or go to restaurants specifically to post pictures. As someone who tends not to care about what they eat, so long as it’s filling and keeps me alive, it’s always been a bit hard for me to understand the extreme fixation of Taiwanese culture on food (which is nothing new; it’s a traditional greeting in Taiwanese for someone to ask if you’ve eaten yet—Jiă bà buāi? or 吃飽了嗎?, literally “Have you eaten yet?”—though it’s not as common among young people now.) It’s hardly unique to Taiwan that local watering holes or restaurants become famous for certain dishes. But Taiwan seems to take it to extremes, with each city or town having its own local specialties, and tasting all of them an absolute requirement for visitors. This tendency is so pronounced that traveling to other parts of Taiwan on vacation often feels like a nonstop process of wandering from place to place with local friends to try every local food and drink recommendation—hours and hours of walking around local markets, or from restaurant to restaurant. Such places often offer a trademark specialty, or zhaopai (招牌), which is sometimes a sampler plate of the whole menu. And when you eat these specialties, you’ll of course post a picture of each one on social media. ![](https://popula.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/brian7-816x612.jpg) Suncakes from Taichung JeanHavoc \[CC BY-SA 3.0\] Wikimedia Commons The list is endless: [Suncakes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suncake_\(Taiwan\)) in Taichung, [coffin bread](https://www.saveur.com/g00/taiwanese-coffin-bread-pot-pie?i10c.ua=1&i10c.encReferrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8%3D&i10c.dv=17) and [danzai noodles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ta-a_noodles) in Tainan,\* [ba-wan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ba-wan) in Changhua, [a-geh](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-gei) in Tamsui. Or you might go for a special variation of a familiar Taiwanese dish, such as minced pork rice in southern Taiwan in place of the braised pork rice of northern Taiwan, the northern versus the southern variant of bawan, or the near-infinite varieties of zongzi. Everyone swears by his own favorite place. ![](https://popula.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/brian10-652x612.png) Different varieties of zongzi. Huang Wen-jun ![](https://popula.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/brian8-816x612.jpg) Ba-wan, in the southern variation. Takoradee/WikiCommons/CC ![](https://popula.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/brian9-816x612.png) A-gei. Seasurger/WikiCommons/CC ![](https://popula.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/brianmap-382x612.png) Regional varieties of rice paired with meat. 文化銀行 Bank of Culture Coffee shops in Taiwan are now so prevalent, in Taipei at least, that one wonders how they all manage to survive—though admittedly many of them don’t. Competition is so fierce that Taipei’s coffee shops have to have some striking feature to distinguish themselves—[odd chairs hanging from the ceiling like hammocks](https://www.facebook.com/wengucafe), [live llamas wandering around,](https://www.facebook.com/oiacafe/) [being especially tiny, with room for just one seat](https://www.facebook.com/yixialonetogether/). For many of these novelty places, once everyone has gone and taken a selfie there, business dries up. ![](https://popula.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/brian5-816x612.jpg) New coffee shop Brian Hioe ![](https://popula.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/brian3-816x612.png) Laodian ![](https://popula.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/brian1-816x612.png) Laodian Brian Hioe Long-established restaurants acquire a special status, the status of laodian, literally “old store” (老店), which adds to their prestige. Any older town or region may also have an “old street” (老街), consisting primarily of laodian restaurants or other old shops. Some old, historic coffee shops are thought of as laodian. The newer ones have chic interiors, but the run-down, even dirty interior of a laodian has its own kind of appeal as a marker of authenticity, and of a long history. ![](https://popula.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/brian4-816x612.jpg) Modern coffee in Taipei Brian Hioe Few of the Taiwanese coffee shops out there will last long enough to become laodian. The over-saturation of the market suggests that it’s only a matter of time before a coffee shop apocalypse wipes out the majority of them. Many a handwringing thinkpiece has wondered why so many young people—[particularly Taiwanese “wenqing”,](https://popula.com/2019/01/10/in-defense-of-wenqing-%E6%96%87%E9%9D%92/) sometimes translated as “hipsters”—seem so intent on opening up coffee shops; [despairing baby boomers seem upset at the thought that young people have no higher ambitions.](https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/12/08/458131681/taiwans-strawberry-generation-reaches-out-to-the-young-and-trendy) I’ve also heard that young people want to start businesses, but in an age lacking economic opportunities, a coffee shop seems like a reasonably profitable option. Whether it’s a high-groove coffee shop or a classic laodian, a key element of success, it seems, is the ability to sell the story behind the store. As we’ve noted, sometimes the story is the chance to post a weird photo or a regional dish on social media. But sometimes the story is about the patrons, or the owners. I went with a friend recently to [a Taipei-based southern Taiwanese cuisine restaurant](https://www.facebook.com/pages/%E7%94%B0%E5%9C%92%E5%8F%B0%E8%8F%9C%E6%B5%B7%E9%AE%AE/205358369487352) popular with Tsai Ing-wen, the current president, in her college days. Even after becoming a senior government official, she apparently continued to hold meetings there with her colleagues. Youth activists were fond of going to [A-Cai’s Restaurant](http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2012/04/09/2003529896)—a rechao, [a form of Taiwanese restaurant serving cheap stir-fried food with drink](https://asia.nikkei.com/Life-Arts/Life/Taiwanese-cuisine-s-delicious-secret-set-to-emerge)—that was famous because dissident journalists and political activists frequented it during the authoritarian period. Well-known public figures in Taiwan such as actors, directors, or even politicians cash in their cultural capital by opening restaurants. Fans might show up trying to catch a glimpse of them—heck, I admit I’ve done that too, for example, hoping to catch a glimpse of [director Tsai Ming-liang at the coffee shop he used to own.](https://www.filmcommission.taipei/en/MessageNotice/NewsDet/1948) There’s a whole micro-genre of news about restaurateurs and shop owners caught on camera and becoming well-known simply because they are attractive; even the largest media outlets in Taiwan, such as the Liberty Times, Apple Daily, and United Daily News, trade at times in this kind of tabloid fare. This genre features both men and women—[usually the latter, given the open misogyny of mainstream media outlets in Taiwan](https://newbloommag.net/2017/03/20/taiwanese-media-misogyny/)—and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that it had led to stalking incidents, though you don’t hear about them in the news. Less disturbingly, there are stories of those who left respectable professions for the food world: [The professor who gave it all up for a fried chicken stand,](https://tw.appledaily.com/headline/daily/20130310/34878500/) or [the electronics industry worker who opened a pizza store.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ytwq8xRnws) And there’s the store owner who wins some kind of international culinary competition—[baking bread](https://guide.michelin.com/sg/people/chef-spotlight-master-baker-wu-pao-chun/news), say, or [pastry art.](https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3586539) After winning prestige for Taiwan on the world stage—something Taiwan is always desperately in search of, given its marginalization from the international community—they come back to Taiwan to open a restaurant to which people will flock, out of a sense of nothing less than national pride. The best chance for a restaurateur in Taiwan is to be good-looking, win some kind of international competition, and also have switched careers to pursue a driving passion involving food. There have even been movies made about such individuals, [such as the biopic of baker Wu Pao-chun,](https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E4%B8%96%E7%95%8C%E7%AC%AC%E4%B8%80%E2%BF%BA%E9%BA%A5%E6%96%B9) who won the 2010 Bakery Masters contest held in Paris, which touted him as an emblem of Taiwanese identity. [After Wu stated pro-unification views, likely hoping for access to the larger and more lucrative Chinese bread market, his fame became somewhat controversial](https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3593863). Before I chanced upon this movie on television one day, I had no idea that making bread could be so dramatic. Which I guess is to be expected for someone lacking any real sense of taste, and who eats food only to survive. * \Correction: an earlier version mistakenly identified coffin bread as a specialty of Chiayi; it is a specialty of Tainan. 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Readable Markdown	![]() Brian Hioe The best chance for a restaurateur in Taiwan is to be good-looking, win some kind of international competition, and also have switched careers to pursue a driving passion involving food. Published on Feb 13, 2019 3:30PM EST Brian Hioe is a freelance translator, a writer on social movements and youth culture in Asia, and founding editor at New Bloom Magazine. [See more](https://popula.com/author/brian-hioe/) It’s become popular all over the world, in recent years, to take photos of what you eat and post them on social media. Some people religiously take photos of everything they eat, keep food diaries, or go to restaurants specifically to post pictures. As someone who tends not to care about what they eat, so long as it’s filling and keeps me alive, it’s always been a bit hard for me to understand the extreme fixation of Taiwanese culture on food (which is nothing new; it’s a traditional greeting in Taiwanese for someone to ask if you’ve eaten yet—Jiă bà buāi? or 吃飽了嗎?, literally “Have you eaten yet?”—though it’s not as common among young people now.) It’s hardly unique to Taiwan that local watering holes or restaurants become famous for certain dishes. But Taiwan seems to take it to extremes, with each city or town having its own local specialties, and tasting all of them an absolute requirement for visitors. This tendency is so pronounced that traveling to other parts of Taiwan on vacation often feels like a nonstop process of wandering from place to place with local friends to try every local food and drink recommendation—hours and hours of walking around local markets, or from restaurant to restaurant. Such places often offer a trademark specialty, or zhaopai (招牌), which is sometimes a sampler plate of the whole menu. And when you eat these specialties, you’ll of course post a picture of each one on social media. ![](https://popula.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/brian7-816x612.jpg) Suncakes from Taichung JeanHavoc \[CC BY-SA 3.0\] Wikimedia Commons The list is endless: [Suncakes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suncake_\(Taiwan\)) in Taichung, [coffin bread](https://www.saveur.com/g00/taiwanese-coffin-bread-pot-pie?i10c.ua=1&i10c.encReferrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8%3D&i10c.dv=17) and [danzai noodles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ta-a_noodles) in Tainan,\* [ba-wan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ba-wan) in Changhua, [a-geh](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-gei) in Tamsui. Or you might go for a special variation of a familiar Taiwanese dish, such as minced pork rice in southern Taiwan in place of the braised pork rice of northern Taiwan, the northern versus the southern variant of bawan, or the near-infinite varieties of zongzi. Everyone swears by his own favorite place. ![](https://popula.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/brian10-652x612.png) Different varieties of zongzi. Huang Wen-jun ![](https://popula.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/brian8-816x612.jpg) Ba-wan, in the southern variation. Takoradee/WikiCommons/CC ![](https://popula.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/brian9-816x612.png) A-gei. Seasurger/WikiCommons/CC ![](https://popula.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/brianmap-382x612.png) Regional varieties of rice paired with meat. 文化銀行 Bank of Culture Coffee shops in Taiwan are now so prevalent, in Taipei at least, that one wonders how they all manage to survive—though admittedly many of them don’t. Competition is so fierce that Taipei’s coffee shops have to have some striking feature to distinguish themselves—[odd chairs hanging from the ceiling like hammocks](https://www.facebook.com/wengucafe), [live llamas wandering around,](https://www.facebook.com/oiacafe/) [being especially tiny, with room for just one seat](https://www.facebook.com/yixialonetogether/). For many of these novelty places, once everyone has gone and taken a selfie there, business dries up. ![](https://popula.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/brian5-816x612.jpg) New coffee shop Brian Hioe ![](https://popula.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/brian3-816x612.png) Laodian ![](https://popula.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/brian1-816x612.png) Laodian Brian Hioe Long-established restaurants acquire a special status, the status of laodian, literally “old store” (老店), which adds to their prestige. Any older town or region may also have an “old street” (老街), consisting primarily of laodian restaurants or other old shops. Some old, historic coffee shops are thought of as laodian. The newer ones have chic interiors, but the run-down, even dirty interior of a laodian has its own kind of appeal as a marker of authenticity, and of a long history. ![](https://popula.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/brian4-816x612.jpg) Modern coffee in Taipei Brian Hioe Few of the Taiwanese coffee shops out there will last long enough to become laodian. The over-saturation of the market suggests that it’s only a matter of time before a coffee shop apocalypse wipes out the majority of them. Many a handwringing thinkpiece has wondered why so many young people—[particularly Taiwanese “wenqing”,](https://popula.com/2019/01/10/in-defense-of-wenqing-%E6%96%87%E9%9D%92/) sometimes translated as “hipsters”—seem so intent on opening up coffee shops; [despairing baby boomers seem upset at the thought that young people have no higher ambitions.](https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/12/08/458131681/taiwans-strawberry-generation-reaches-out-to-the-young-and-trendy) I’ve also heard that young people want to start businesses, but in an age lacking economic opportunities, a coffee shop seems like a reasonably profitable option. Whether it’s a high-groove coffee shop or a classic laodian, a key element of success, it seems, is the ability to sell the story behind the store. As we’ve noted, sometimes the story is the chance to post a weird photo or a regional dish on social media. But sometimes the story is about the patrons, or the owners. I went with a friend recently to [a Taipei-based southern Taiwanese cuisine restaurant](https://www.facebook.com/pages/%E7%94%B0%E5%9C%92%E5%8F%B0%E8%8F%9C%E6%B5%B7%E9%AE%AE/205358369487352) popular with Tsai Ing-wen, the current president, in her college days. Even after becoming a senior government official, she apparently continued to hold meetings there with her colleagues. Youth activists were fond of going to [A-Cai’s Restaurant](http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2012/04/09/2003529896)—a rechao, [a form of Taiwanese restaurant serving cheap stir-fried food with drink](https://asia.nikkei.com/Life-Arts/Life/Taiwanese-cuisine-s-delicious-secret-set-to-emerge)—that was famous because dissident journalists and political activists frequented it during the authoritarian period. Well-known public figures in Taiwan such as actors, directors, or even politicians cash in their cultural capital by opening restaurants. Fans might show up trying to catch a glimpse of them—heck, I admit I’ve done that too, for example, hoping to catch a glimpse of [director Tsai Ming-liang at the coffee shop he used to own.](https://www.filmcommission.taipei/en/MessageNotice/NewsDet/1948) There’s a whole micro-genre of news about restaurateurs and shop owners caught on camera and becoming well-known simply because they are attractive; even the largest media outlets in Taiwan, such as the Liberty Times, Apple Daily, and United Daily News, trade at times in this kind of tabloid fare. This genre features both men and women—[usually the latter, given the open misogyny of mainstream media outlets in Taiwan](https://newbloommag.net/2017/03/20/taiwanese-media-misogyny/)—and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that it had led to stalking incidents, though you don’t hear about them in the news. Less disturbingly, there are stories of those who left respectable professions for the food world: [The professor who gave it all up for a fried chicken stand,](https://tw.appledaily.com/headline/daily/20130310/34878500/) or [the electronics industry worker who opened a pizza store.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ytwq8xRnws) And there’s the store owner who wins some kind of international culinary competition—[baking bread](https://guide.michelin.com/sg/people/chef-spotlight-master-baker-wu-pao-chun/news), say, or [pastry art.](https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3586539) After winning prestige for Taiwan on the world stage—something Taiwan is always desperately in search of, given its marginalization from the international community—they come back to Taiwan to open a restaurant to which people will flock, out of a sense of nothing less than national pride. The best chance for a restaurateur in Taiwan is to be good-looking, win some kind of international competition, and also have switched careers to pursue a driving passion involving food. There have even been movies made about such individuals, [such as the biopic of baker Wu Pao-chun,](https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E4%B8%96%E7%95%8C%E7%AC%AC%E4%B8%80%E2%BF%BA%E9%BA%A5%E6%96%B9) who won the 2010 Bakery Masters contest held in Paris, which touted him as an emblem of Taiwanese identity. [After Wu stated pro-unification views, likely hoping for access to the larger and more lucrative Chinese bread market, his fame became somewhat controversial](https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3593863). Before I chanced upon this movie on television one day, I had no idea that making bread could be so dramatic. Which I guess is to be expected for someone lacking any real sense of taste, and who eats food only to survive. * \Correction: an earlier version mistakenly identified coffin bread as a specialty of Chiayi; it is a specialty of Tainan. 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