A Taipei Morning

Soya Bean King & Mr. Brown Coffee, Taipei, Taiwan

We walked around that morning and found "Soya Bean King”, so soya bean (or soy bean as it is known in the US) milk it was for breakfast, accompanied by vegetarian bun, glutinous rice and peanut paste soup and yau char kuey / yu tiao, which literally translates to “oil stick” and there couldn’t be a more accurate name for it. I’m guessing it to be about $1.50 per person, keyword is guess.

Soy bean was nice and smooth, not too sweet. Pretty good. But then we have that here in Malaysia so it’s nothing to write home about.

Amazingly enough the vegetarian bun was also oily as all hell.  So in Taiwan it’s deep fried everything including breakfast. It think they first stir fry the vegetables in a few cups of oil before they wrap it in dough and make it, yet the skin is so oily it feels like they dunked the bun in a bowl of oil before baking. Maybe that IS what they do…. /shrug.

The glutinous rice and peanut soup thingy is actually a dessert and the version we have in Malaysia is without glutinous rice. It’s normally very buttery, so making it taste almost like peanut butter, but warm and thick like cream based soup. The glutinous rice in this version made it much less sweeter, which would work for some other people but I kinda prefer the stronger tasting no-rice version.

Around lunchtime we were gonna take a train to Hualien and with a 20kg bag each we had limited choices as to where to walk to, so the first (and only) place we could eat along the way to the train station was Mr. Brown, a coffee chain in Taiwan, so Taiwanese Starbucks. I’ll firstly get this out of the way, the Americano was only average. As for the food…

It was average too. I don’t remember the price but I do remember it was not cheap by any standards. Coming in sets, I had cheese baked fried rice and my friends had a mini pizza and roast chicken with rice. It all came with tomato soup each, which was probably canned. My cheese baked fried rice was not the greatest, I think I’ve had better in Malaysia. It’s apparently a Hongkee invention, baking fried rice topped with cheese and tomato or cream pasta sauce, sometimes with a piece of chicken, beef or fish fillet in between. My friend said the mini pizza was rubbish, and considering that it looks like oven baked vomit topped with egg, I’ll say he’s being kind. The roast chicken guy had nothing to say about his meal so that’s that. Then it was off to Hualien for better food, more about that in the next post.