Vegetarian Travel - Shilin Night Market, Taipei

士林夜市

One of the highlights of visiting Taipei is to visit the night markets. Among the many night markets, Shilin is probably the biggest and most popular.

Night markets are the places where people indulge in various street eats. However, options for vegetarians are pretty limited.

Fret not. At Shilin, you get to try the various vegetarian version of street eats.

In the covered Shilin Night Market next to the Jiantan MRT station (the big red star next in the map), I counted 4 vegetarian stalls.

There is a stall selling spaghetti and baked rice. For those traveling alone, you get can get your fix of hot pots here as there is a stall that serve personal hot pots.

There are 2 stalls which serve local Taiwanese fare near the back of the market. However, one of the stall was deserted. The other had more patrons. Of course, I went to the one that had more customers. There is probably a reason why the other one is deserted.

I ordered fried stinking tofu(臭豆腐). Initially, I was a little hesitant about ordering this. But my Taiwanese friend said he would eat it if I won't. It turned out to be quite palatable as it did not stink too much.

I also ordered fried oyster omelete （蚵仔煎). There is no "oyster" in it. It is made from soy sheets (豆包)and seaweed, fried with sweet potato starch and some vegetables. Egg was optional. This was a lot nicer than the one I tried at a stall near the Yuanshan MRT.

I also ordered fried wontan (炸馄饨）, which was nothing special, and Taiwanese tempura （甜不辣). Taiwanese "tempura" is really fried fish paste, totally unlikely Japanese tempura which is prawns or vegetables fried in a crispy batter. I found the tempura a little too salty, but otherwise quite tasty. I am not sure what is it made of.

The price of each dish ranges from NT$30 to NT$80.

Besides the covered market next to the MRT, there is a big section of open street market further up along Dadong street (大东路) and Danang street (大南路). I did not find any specific vegetarian food stalls, except for one stall selling fried buns (生煎包) at the junction of Danang street with the main street (Wenlin Street). The stall sells only one flavour -- cabbage fillings. NT$10 each. Near it, there is a stall selling crispy onion pancake (葱油饼), it looked good, but the queue for it was really long. I was not inclined to queue up for it. There is another stall near by selling Indian wraps. It was nan wrapped with curry stuffings. There were three options, chicken, mutton and vegetarian (potato). But I thought it was quite expensive as it was NT$80 each.