Taipei Night Markets Ranked: Raohe, Shilin, Ningxia, Tonghua

Taipei's food culture is built around six or seven major night markets that come alive between 6pm and midnight. The stalls are competitive, dense, varied, and cheap to a degree that makes you feel like you've gotten away with something. We ate at four across four evenings in October 2019.

#4: Tonghua Night Market

The locals' market in Da'an, away from the tourist trail. The stalls are run by people who've been making the same dish for forty years, prices are 20% lower than the famous markets.

The orders: braised pork rice (lu rou fan, 30 NTD/£0.75), oyster omelette (oh-ah-jien, 70 NTD), and stinky tofu (chou doufu, 60 NTD). Stinky tofu smells genuinely terrible (fermented tofu, deep fried, pickled cabbage) and tastes excellent. Taiwan is the place to try it. Tonghua is the market to try it at.

What Tonghua doesn't have: neon, queues, Instagram opportunities. What it has: locals.

#3: Ningxia Night Market

A short, focused strip in Datong, about thirty stalls since the 1950s. Every stall is famous for one thing.

The orders: pig blood cake (zhu xie gao, 40 NTD, sweet potato glutinous rice topped with peanut powder), oyster vermicelli soup (60 NTD), steamed rice rolls (50 NTD), and sweet dou hua (silken tofu pudding with brown sugar, 35 NTD).

This is the market locals send foreign food writers to. The Ningxia pork floss bun is the dish you'd photograph if you could photograph one bun.

#2: Shilin Night Market

The famous big one. Two thousand stalls. Yes, it's crowded. Yes, half the stalls sell the same six dishes. But the scale and energy are the show.

The orders: oversized chicken cutlet at Hot Star (fried chicken breast as big as your face, 70 NTD), pepper buns at Fuzhou (chargrilled in a clay oven, 50 NTD), shaved ice with mango (100 NTD), and a frog egg drink (tapioca and basil seeds, 40 NTD, the texture is deliberately weird).

The trick: go on a Tuesday or Wednesday, not a weekend. Same dishes, half the queue.

#1: Raohe Street Night Market

Raohe is the one we'd send anyone to first. Medium-sized, single straight street between two arched entrances, high concentration of quality, and it ends at the Songshan Ciyou Temple which is a beautiful punctuation mark.

The mandatory orders: pepper buns at Fuzhou Shi Zu (the original branch, 60 NTD, queue 25 minutes, served from a tandoor-style oven, eat while scalding hot), drunken shrimp (300 NTD, live prawns marinated in rice wine, served raw, not for everyone), oyster omelette (75 NTD, the best version we had in Taiwan), and the dry-fried stinky tofu.

Arrive at 6pm when stalls open. The pepper bun queue doubles by 7pm.

The breakfast nobody tells you about

The actually best food in Taipei is at the daytime spots, not the night markets. Fu Hang Dou Jiang at Huashan Square: 7am queue (yes, 7am), forty minutes, and at the front a woman hands you shao bing (salted layered flatbread) wrapped around a youtiao (deep-fried dough stick), with a cup of hot salted soy milk. 50 NTD/person (£1.20). The best breakfast of the trip.

Taipei night market cost for 4 nights, two people

Taiwan is the cheapest food country we've been to in Asia outside Vietnam.