Casual Fare

My friends,

Here in northern Taiwan, we have made it out of Typhoon Krathon largely unscathed. Southern Taiwan, especially Kaohsiung, was not so lucky. For photos, I highly recommend the Instagram account of photographer Annabelle Chih , who has been so excellent at covering it from so many different perspectives.

Unlike my experience growing up with snow days, in Taiwan they make the decision to cancel school/work the night before at 8pm (no listening to the radio at 6am with sleepy hope). Businesses must shut down with some exceptions, and the exceptions are supposed to pay double (though from what I understand, this realistically only applies to larger corporations that face more scrutiny). In our own neighborhood, for those two days about half the usual restaurants were open, as were about half the hair salons. Every lottery shop was open, as was the laundromat (thankfully), and a tattoo parlor. For Taipei, the typhoon day was very much a “kids getting a snow day” vibe.

Carolina and I stayed home and played video games and endlessly asked each other if it was raining.

People look at me a little like I’m crazy when I say this, but besides the typhoon, I think this was the mildest August and September we’ve spent in Taiwan. Don’t get me wrong: it was still gross. I still sweat an uncomfortable and disturbing amount. And yet there was a lot of rain, and days when I went outside and texted Carolina to say “hey, it’s not so bad out here,” and a ten day stretch where I didn’t have to empty the dehumidifier a single time and so I thought for a moment that it might be broken. I even went for a single unprompted outdoor walk on purpose in September, which I believe is unprecedented.

But I’m still unreasonably excited for better weather, for the kind of crisp air that makes me feel like I’m wasting a chance if I take the bus or MRT home instead of walking. To say goodbye to the limited geography of summer heat, I thought this month it’d be fun to describe to you three nearby restaurants that are our most common, we-don’t-want-to-cook, we-also-don’t-want-to-pick-a-new-place-to-go-to, and it’s-too-hot-to-go-much-further meal spots.

1. Japanese Curry/日式咖哩飯. There’s a shop on the corner near our house that was a branch of Louisa Coffee when we moved. Louisa has decent sandwiches but awful coffee so we didn’t go there much. Then for a brief window it was a specialty meat and seafood shop with unusually high prices that made it unsurprising it didn’t last. Now it’s a little curry shop with bar seating plus three tables, a total of maybe 10 seats. It’s run by one guy who I think of as my age but could be ten years younger than me who is always exceedingly nice, apologizing for lacking a particular vegetable and offering free kimchi to make up for it. Some days it is completely full, many days it is completely empty, and I am sad to say that it will not surprise me if I walk outside to find it gone. When it’s empty, you can see the guy who runs it sitting on the curb smoking, or sitting at his own bar where you can hear he’s listening to loud Japanese rock. When a customer walks in, he switches the music over to slightly less loud Japanese pop. I wish he would smoke less. If you haven’t had Japanese curry, the way I think of it is the brown gravy I grew up putting on mashed potatoes mixed with Indian spices, like cumin and turmeric. The curry sauce is typically served over chunks of meat, potatoes, and carrots, and alongside rice, but for me the meat is skipped for some broccoli, corn, soybeans, and cashews. It’s a good healthy+hearty meal, and it’s disturbingly cheap at this place. Japanese curry packets are everywhere now, including, I discovered this summer, Krogers in Kentucky, so you should try making it.
2. Bibimbap/石鍋拌飯. Down the street there’s what I think of as a mom-and-pop Korean place that’s been here longer than we have and is consistently packed at lunch, inconsistently at dinner. We can’t go here at noon, but we still go often. I always get dolsot bibimbap, which is a super hot stone bowl that they oil up then scoop in rice and top with a variety of veggies (seaweed, shredded carrot, kimchi, burdock, greens), and a fried egg. On the menu, you choose between pork, chicken, or beef so every time I have to tell them I want no meat as I am incapable of handwriting it. I have this dream that one day I will go in and they will have new menus that include a meatless option and then I will take the credit for it. Korean restaurants are usually most noted for their banchan, the many little plates of appetizers, but this place is very reasonably priced and only includes a little soup and side kimchi. If the soup is miso or seaweed I’ll happily get some, but occasionally the soup involves cubed liver. An older man and woman run it, alongside a rotating cast of younger guys who wash dishes and do prep work, and I love walking past their shop when they’re closing up because their relief and satisfaction is palpable from the sidewalk. It’s difficult to go there when they’re busy, not just because it’s crowded but also because the woman wears her anxiety very clearly on her face and I have to avoid looking.
3. Basil dan bing/九層塔蛋餅. Dan bing doesn’t have a good translation, but it’s frequently listed as a pancake on translated menus. Here that’s connected to green onion pancakes, not maple syrup pad of butter pancakes. They’re thin, and easy to buy frozen, and you cook one side on the griddle and then flip it over and cook an egg beside it or under it and then roll it up with the egg inside and slice it into bite-size pieces. A thicker, similar dish called 蔥油餅 is oilier, but when I’m feeling like I need something heavy and greasy I’ll get it instead — the name literally means green onion oil pancake. You can get a bunch of different ingredients along with the egg inside dan bing — ham, cheese, corn, kimchi, fried chicken, and more — but our favorite is by far Thai basil. One odd thing is that that there’s a million little breakfast shops that sell dan bing, but on almost every menu, it’s expected you only get one ingredient as a filling, so ordering some kind of combination is an obstacle. (Some days I draft plans to open a shop that sells rice rolls and dan bing with Mexican-style fillings.) The typical sauce for these is a thick, sweet soy sauce, but we prefer our neighborhood shop’s spicy soy sauce that has had peppers marinating in it for a length of time I would be uncomfortable knowing. Our shop is run by two women who seem to be sisters, one of whom lives two doors down from our apartment. The one who is our neighbor almost never smiles while working but always smiles and waves when we meet on the street. They open at 7pm, and when I walk past at 8, it’s common to see one of their sons fixing himself something to eat, one of the ladies preparing an army of dough discs and then an oven full of sesame bread for the morning, and a young couple who look like they’ve just gotten off work stealing bites of dan bing or noodles off of each other’s plates.

When you come visit, we can eat at all three, and I’ll tell the 老闆s that these are my friends from the US and they will say 歡迎歡迎 and ask if you’ve eaten Taiwanese food before and then we will order too much and be disappointed we didn’t plan our stomach space more carefully. The end.

Further reading:

• “have you considered your own loneliness is simply a lack of imagination.” Poetry by Hanif Abdurraqib in the Yale Review .
• Also in the Yale Review , Christina Sharpe on grief , personal and global. So thoughtful and thorough and I could not help but chant “yes” again and again as I read it.
• The internet is a strange, terrifying place, occasionally home to my favorite flavor of beautiful strangeness. One such example is Celebrity Number Six. In 2020, a user on reddit posted a picture of fabric that featured a variety of celebrity photos from the 2000s, most of which were easily recognizable, except for one. The internet spent four years trying to find out who it was, until someone found the original photographer, which led to the identity of the face: Spanish model Leticia Sardá. Read the full story on Wikipedia , or see the post chronicling the search on reddit .
• I have this clear memory of hearing a Fresh Air interview with researchers or authors looking at so-called “Blue Zones” — places where the average life expectancy was statistically significantly above average. I found the reasons ascribed to these places fascinating: Seventh-Day Adventists in southern California don’t smoke/drink, are mostly vegetarian, and go for a lot of long walks. Okinawans eat tons of fish and are constantly getting up and down off the ground due to sitting on the floor being common. Mediterraneans, well, their diet is legendary. TURNS OUT the data was all fudged and blue zones aren’t really a thing. Guess that should’ve been obvious when there started to be “Blue Zone Cooking Classes.”
• Helen Rosner wrote about NYC’s Din Tai Fung . I have not been to an American branch of the restaurant, but her experience reads mostly familiar. The photos, which involve American-sized beverages and noodles twirled on a fork, are disconcerting in a similar way to AI-generated photos, though. I think the comparison to Cheesecake Factory makes one bristle, but it also makes sense. “The real excitement was for the brand itself: as is the case with so many chain restaurants, Din Tai Fung is in the business of not only selling dinner but also selling nostalgia, selling familiarity, selling Din Tai Fung.”
• Two Taiwan-related books that were published this year and I’m excited to check out soon: Chop Fry Watch Learn by Michelle T. King about “Taiwan’s Julia Child” Fu Pei-mei ( Review ), and Where Every Ghost Has a Name by Kim Liao about the author investigating her grandfather’s role in Taiwan’s independence movement ( Interview ).
• Finally, three recommendations. Freiren is the best show I’ve watched in a long time — you should check it out, even if you don’t normally do anime. (I want to read smart writing about Freiren so send along recommendations.) 問題總部 It’s Your Fault is a Taiwanese neo-soul band I stumbled upon and suggest you give a listen to. Here’s their song, “Day.” And, finally, I have a soft spot in my heart for absurdist internet videos, and Camille on YouTube is the latest creator to scratch that itch. I’m sorry .

I recently read a collection of case studies by Oliver Sacks entitled An Anthropologist on Mars . The title of the collection comes from his essay about Temple Grandin, but the book covers a wide range of neurological and psychological phenomena in a similar style to his other work. This kind of book is morally fraught — several of the subjects seem unable to fully consent to being written about — but the story that stuck in my mind the most was one where this was not the case. Shirl Jennings went blind at about ten years old, then in his fifties he had surgery which partially restored his vision. However, his brain was unable to cope with the newfound sensory information, and the effects seemed to make him unhappy. He could see things, but couldn’t do much with the information, and was unable to have depth perception, identify shapes/faces, or observe less than drastic differences in color.

I found this story very touching because of the lessons we can draw from it outside of vision. Throughout our lives, we are constantly shutting down paths in our brains — mindsets, ways of thinking, what have you — atrophy due to disuse, which leads to a rigidity, an inability to cope with new situations or information. It’s hard work to fight against this closing of doors! But fight we should.

Keep the doors open, my friends,

-g