A taste of Taipei

The Taiwanese seem besotted with food. The National Palace Museum in Taipei has almost 700,000 objects in its collection, but the most popular two items are a piece of jade that looks like a pak choi cabbage and a stone which resembles a slice of pork belly. You can judge a nation by what it treasures most — and we only had three days in Taipei, so we decided to let the city’s culinary life dominate our experience.

My boyfriend Ed and I arrived at night — hungry and awake. Unlike Bangkok, where we had just flown from, Taipei seemed to be a sleepy city. On a side street, away from the comfort of the Mandarin Oriental, we found a restaurant serving something. It was unclear what, but we ordered two bowls. What arrived was a Chinese-style hot pot with noodles sunken beneath the dark broth. The man on the next-door table started laughing at us, but we were too famished to care why.