Jiufen 九份

Jiufen is a small old mining town near Taipei that has become quite a popular tourist destination for day trippers.

There is only one pure vegetarian eatery along the tourist street in this town. It's the "Jinzhi vegetarian meat balls" 金枝素肉圆(See picture). Do note that there are 2 Jinzhi meat balls stall. One stall uses real meat, the other one uses seitan to replace the meat.

The "meat ball" is really a big piece of dumpling, the skin is made from some kind of flour (I think it's glutenous rice) and its filling is seitan with wine lees. The red color comes from the lees left over from a Chinese rice wine making process. Don't worry, there is no alchohol in it.

Each order is only 1 ball (NT$40). It's not going to be enough for a meal. It tastes rather sweet.

Besides the meat balls, on the menu are mushroom balls soup (NT$35) "shark fins" soup (NT$35), plus the same soup with bean vermicelli (NT$60). I had the "shark fins" soup. I don't know what's the relation to "shark fins". It suspect it's a reference some kind of melon or gourd which I find in the soup. It's really not worth it. The amount of vermicelli is too little and the soup is artificially flavoured (tasted like there's lots of MSG in it).


Although there are no other vegetarian eateries, there are plenty of snacks without meat in it.

There are many pastries stalls that sells crispy pastry with various vegetable paste (e.g. yam paste, red bean paste) in its filling. I don't think they use lard, but eggs may be used in the pastries.

In this picture, the stall owner is making peanut candy, which is vegetarian.

I found a BBQ mushroom stall as well. I didn't try it.






Then I discovered a stinking tofu stall. The stall says "Shenkeng Stinking tofu" 深坑. Shenkeng 深坑 is a small town near Taipei which is famous for tofu and one of the popular street food there is BBQ stinking tofu. I decided to try it because a) the sign says it's vegetarian (and I confirmed with the stall owner) and b) it did not smell offending when I was standing directly over the tofu. The tofu is layered with a sauce and then roasted over an electric grill. It turned out to be very delicious (the sauce was really good). It's NT$25 per skewer of tofu.

(BTW, if you ever visit Shenkeng 深坑, look for the Chen Family Tofu Restaurant 陈家豆腐. It's a pure vegetarian restaurant that serves all sorts of tofu dishes. I did not go there, saw this on a guidebook. Dishes reportedly are inexpensive, starts from NT$50 per dish)