Eating With Taiwanese

I was warned over and over by Saint Lucians living in Taiwan that the food is completely different from what I’m used to. I imagined that tofu would be the scariest thing. Then again, I expected the food to be different. Why travel across the world only to be served something that tastes like green fig and salt fish? It turned out that the ingredients weren’t all that foreign to me. But, oh, who knew such appetizing dishes could be made from, say, yams?

On my first night in Taiwan, after being in the air for some 30 hours, I and the rest of our International Cooperation and Development press group were welcomed by our exceptional host Vincent Lu, with a most extravagant dinner. All ten of us were seated together around a massive table with a spinning disk in the middle. With good reason we were warned that the Taiwanese people go out of their way to ensure their guests always leave the dinner table totally stuffed. Imagine realizing your menu did not entail meal options, but eight courses. Some of us were half asleep by the fourth course.

Come the next day and it seemed every order at our restaurant was enough to feed Canaries. On the occasion, Ambassador Henry M. J. Chen, (Director-General of Taiwan’s Department of International Information Services) was the host of a welcome luncheon with an unforgettable almond milk-based dessert. We learned the spinning disk in the centre of the dining table served a purpose. It’s where the waiters place their massive bowls, platters and hot stones filled with food. A serve yourself situation.

Maybe we were taken to places with the best chefs, but it was almost impossible to resist anything placed in front of us. Most times it was because of curiosity, especially when it came to dumplings and dim sum of varying fillings, shapes and colours. The tastes were always unexpected, but nothing was as repulsive as my friends thought, at least to me. Well, to be fair, I didn’t have stinky tofu or whatever the prime minister had on his visit. The strangest food for me was a steaming bowl of “white fungu with red date”. Otherwise I enjoyed a wide selection of seafood, especially Japanese style, and Caribbean-accustomed bananas, mangoes and papayas.

By the third day, we learnt the trick to eating with Taiwanese: take one taste of everything. That means one piece of sashimi, one scoop of beef noodle soup, one bit of fried pork, one bite of all the other twelve dishes. It worked, and that’s how we got the full experience, while making our Taiwanese hosts happy.