The Shilin Night Market is the largest and most well known night market in Taiwan. Spreading out north from the Jiantan Subway Station, the market is a veritable playground of trinkets, games, and most importantly, food.

When setting foot inside the market, you’re immediately bombarded by intoxicating smells, sounds, and sights. It’s easiest just to see for yourself, so here’s the video of my quick walkthrough:

Shilin Night Market Walkthrough from James Yu on Vimeo.

In essence, most of the food is a late night eaters dream. A lot of it involves frying, meats, and savory spices. Perfect after a night of drinking.

There were two main agenda culinary agenda items for me: stinky tofu and oyster omelets.

Oyster omelets are a starchy omelet fried with oysters and topped with a red sweet sauce. There are tons of vendors that hawk this item throughout the market–it’s sometimes known as the unofficial national dish of Taiwan.

Stinky tofu is one of those controversial dishes–you can smell it from a mile away, and yes, the smell is as pungent as any smell can be. It’s basically tofu that has been fermented with various fish and other seafood as a base. The texture of the tofu becomes spongy, and the taste is very complex. Thankfully, it’s one of those things that taste very different than it smells.

Usually, it’s served with some pickled vegetables and a good dollop of chili sauce.

I also had some barbecued mystery meats, including chicken tailbones (which we throw away in the US). It was a bit chewy, but very flavorful due to the high fat content.

I spent the rest of the night walking around the market. There’s a whole section devoted to those claw machine games where you fruitlessly try to win a cute stuffed animal. Some of them, like this one where you win bodyless Chip heads, were actually a bit disturbing.

You can catch all my Taipei pictures in my Flickr set.

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