Cycle 16 – Item 202

POST 5,681

26 (Sat) July 2025

Pan-Fried Buns

3.5

at Fighting Through a Hundred Battles

(Raohe Street Night Market)

-Songshan, Taipei, Republic of China (Taiwan)-

with the Family

Summer Vacation in Taiwan: Day 3 of 4

• • Day 1 (16.200 Lobster, “Taiwanese Style”)
  • Day 2 (16.201 “Chicken Meat”)
  • Day 3 (16.202 Pan-Fried Buns)

In Taipei with the Family.  2nd time for me (see most recently 5.112 Niu Rou Mian), 2nd time for W, 1st time for the boys.  Before sending DJ off to college, the original idea had been to take a grand summer vacation to somewhere far and fancy, like Italy, but neither W nor I felt much like planning or paying for it, so we settled on somewhere closer and cheaper.  No plans really, just looking forward to great food, a bit of touring.

LUNCH

Halal Chinese Beef Noodles is a Chinese restaurant.  Specializes in niu rou mian, apparently halal.  Awarded the Bib Gourmand by the Michelin Guide since 2018.

According to the official itinerary, lunch was scheduled at Yongkang Beef Noodles, where I’d tried been underwhelmed by the beef noodles on my prior visit (see generally 5.112 Niu Rou Mian), but W’s boss insisted that we try Halal Chinese Beef Noodles instead.

We arrived at noon, on a Saturday, probably the busiest time of the week, but fortunately we were seated within minutes.

The restaurant provided a menu in English, but the names of dishes were kinda vague – for example, “braised beef noodles” is the standard spicy version, while “stewed beef noodles” is the same thing but not spicy – and to make things more confusing, the prices didn’t align exactly with the prices in the Chinese menu, which offered dishes not on the English menu.

One factor in deciding on Taipei as our destination was to test DJ’s skills in Mandarin.  He had taken Chinese as his foreign language during high school and finished with a score of 5 on the AP Chinese exam.  To be fair, he had studied the simplified form of characters as used in mainland China, while Taiwan still uses the traditional form – and though one is derived from the other, they look extremely different in most cases – perhaps as different as lowercase and uppercase English letters.  In fact, W sometimes seems to have a better grasp of deciphering signs and menus, as Korean schools back in the day used to to teach traditional Chinese – kinda like teaching Latin in Europe.  Further, the usage and pronunciation of words are also different between Bejing vs Taipei Mandarin – perhaps as different as American vs Australian English.  And finally, this would be his first experience with the language in the wild.

As we sat down and reviewed the menu, DJ did his best to interpret the menu – “We didn’t study Taiwanese beef noodles in class, Dad.” – while simultaneously trying to communicate with the server, a middle-aged woman who kept pointing furiously at various parts of the menu and yelling, obviously annoyed that we hadn’t done advance research to determine exactly what to eat.

After placing our order, it suddenly dawned on me that maybe the restaurant doesn’t take credit cards.  W: “Of course they do.”  They don’t.  We had but NTD 1,300 (USD 44) in cash.  So, while waiting for the food to arrive, we desperately went back through the menu and attempted to add up the total cost, even though we weren’t quite sure what we’d ordered.  According to our best guess, the bill would come out to NTD 1,080 (USD 36).

Even though a bit nervous that we couldn’t afford to pay for it, the food was amazing.

While the shredded beef was just okay per se, the Beijing Sauce being some sort of fermented bean paste, very similar to doenjang, the pancakes were phenomenally chewy and tasty – the best that I’ve ever experienced (forgot to take a proper photo).

The signature noodle soups were perfect all around.  The broth was so infinitely deep in beef flavor that, sorry to be cynical, I suspect chemical enhancement – like seeing a photo of a woman with a superhumanly beautiful body and suspecting that the image must’ve been touched up with PhotoShop.  The huge chunks of meat were supremely tender, while retaining just the right amount of chew, insanely beefy in taste.  The noodles were round and think, perfectly al dente.  Couldn’t decide which one I liked better, one having a purer flavor while the other a more complex flavor profile – like the difference between jiritang vs maeuntang.  The best meal that I’ve had in Taipei yet.

The bill came out to NTD 1,200 (USD 40).  We didn’t dare to question the discrepancy with our estimate.

After lunch, we were unanimous to forgo the sighting items on the afternoon itinerary and just rest back at the hotel – partly because we were still so exhausted from yesterday, partly because the hotel is so nice.

DINNER

For dinner, we ventured out to Raohe Street Night Market.

We arrived way early because I’d hoped to check out a nearby used watch store before going to the market, only to find that it had already closed for the day, so we went straight to the market, arriving around 17:00, still daylight, before all of the stalls had set up for business.

Alas, the night market was something of a bust.  First, we were all so tired and so sweaty that walking around a crowded market wasn’t very pleasant.  After a half-hour, W and I went snuck into a massage joint and got foot rubs, while the boys wandered around by themselves.  Secondly, none of us felt like being particularly adventurous, so the wide variety of food options wasn’t tempting – in fact, the weirdness of certain items, like stinky tofu, was rather off-putting in our current condition.

Looking back at the joy and awe that I’d experienced when visiting the market before, I’m reminded that it was 11 years ago, when I was a youthful 42 years old, and GMTD was yet in Cycle 5, and the glory of discovering of new places and new foods was still novel – I supposed that I’ve just outgrown things like this.  I recall a similar kind of disillusionment regarding Singaporean hawker centers a while ago (see generally 9.083 Chili Crab).  Which is sorta sad, but ultimately fine, as I enjoyed them while I could but moved on to better things.

Not an entire loss, as I stumbled across a tattoo parlor at the entrance to the market – I’ve made a reservation for tomorrow.  Stay tuned.

(See RESTAURANTS IN TAIWAN)

(See GLOBAL FOOD GLOSSARY)

(See BOOZE)