Shilin Night market (Taipei)

Even though I had gotten a little tired of Taiwanese food at that point I still wanted to check out Shilin Night Market, the largest and most well known night market in Taipei.  It’s a short walking distance from the MTR station (though it’s not at the Shilin station…it’s 2 or 3 stops before it), there’re two sections to it. The first part is inside a marketplace. As you can see in the picture, the marketplace was completely dense with food stalls and signages. It’s a crazy visually overloaded place!

the 2nd part of the night market is the surrounding outdoor area. Just blocks and blocks of nonstop street food stalls and small shops selling cheap clothes and other junk. Some shops would set up stalls right in the middle of the street until the cops come.

Generally the food inside the marketplace seems to be better and many stalls have sitting area.

Sausages and Oyster omelet

A popular stall of grill meat on sticks, we got the Pork blood cake (pork blood with rice).

With all the bold flavors, fried and greasy food in the night market, fresh fruit juices are very essential. Places that sell fresh fruit juices were abundant, I noticed that Bitter melon juice (the white fruit with lumps) is very popular in Taiwan. We got one to try, it’s blended with honey so it’s not bitter at all. I like it a lot, it’s very cooling for sure.

Lots of dessert stalls as well. Most of them are Taiwanese slush ice (pix on the left are the different toppings you can add) and mango ice. The pix on the right is Lemon aiyu jelly, one of my favorite Taiwanese drink.

There’re many many more food there, like fried chicken, stinky tofu, grill steak (yes there’re couple stalls sell grill steak!), oyster vermicelli…etc etc.  However the night market in the marketplace could get quite overwhelming as the food vendors were very aggressive. They would keep pestering you to buy their food and wouldn’t stop until you do. In fact it was kind of annoying that I prefer the outdoor part a little bit better.

Shilin Night market
Take the metro Danshui Line, exit Jiantan Station.

Tags: Street Food, Taiwanese, Travel Report