Southern Taiwan Food & Traditional Cuisine

Southern Taiwan, and Tainan above all, is where Taiwanese people go to eat. The city is widely regarded as the island’s culinary capital, and the reason is its xiaochi tradition — small eats, single dishes made by shops that have done nothing else for three or four generations.

The southern palate is distinctly sweeter than the rest of Taiwan, a legacy of three centuries of sugar production on the Chianan plain. Sugar goes into savoury braises, sauces and even noodle broths, and northerners comment on it.

The other foundations are seafood, from the Taiwan Strait and the fish farms and oyster beds of the coast, and the produce of the island’s most fertile plain.

Eating here is a deliberate activity organised around specific shops rather than restaurants: people will cross the city for one bowl of noodles and then go elsewhere for the next course. Many famous shops open at dawn and sell out by lunchtime, and some open only at night.

Danzai noodles — danzai mian — are Tainan’s emblem: a small bowl of noodles in a shrimp-and-pork broth with minced pork, a prawn and a sliver of coriander, sold originally by fishermen in the slack season and still served in small portions so you can eat several things.

Coffin bread — guancai ban — is a thick slab of fried toast hollowed out and filled with a creamy seafood or chicken stew, a Tainan invention from the 1940s and better than it sounds.

Milkfish is the southern fish, farmed in the coastal ponds, served as congee, belly soup or fried, and traditionally eaten for breakfast.

Oyster omelette and oyster noodle soup from the beds off Cigu and Donggang.

Also: rou zong, the southern glutinous rice dumpling, boiled rather than steamed and served with peanut powder and a sweet sauce; shrimp rolls at Anping; bantiao flat rice noodles from the Hakka areas; and black tuna at Donggang in season.

Tainan is organised around its food shops, and the culture is to know which one does which dish. Many are unmarked, in alleys, with a queue outside and a handwritten menu; several have been in the same family since the Japanese period. Opening hours are idiosyncratic and sell-outs are normal, so plan the day around the shop rather than the other way round.

Morning markets across the south sell milkfish congee, rice rolls and the day’s produce from before dawn. Tainan’s Shuixian Gong market is the historic one.

Night markets: Kaohsiung’s Liuhe is the famous one and Ruifeng the one locals prefer; Tainan’s Garden and Flower night markets run on fixed days of the week, which catches visitors out.

Donggang in Pingtung is the fishing port to visit for bluefin tuna, sakura shrimp and oil fish roe, with an auction in season.

Fruit is a southern speciality — mangoes from Yujing, wax apples, pineapples and lychees — and the roadside stalls in summer are worth stopping at.

The south is too hot and humid for viticulture, and there is no wine tradition here. What it has instead is a long history of sugar and the drinks that came with it, and a serious modern craft scene in Kaohsiung.

Sugar refineries defined the southern economy from the Japanese period, and the old plants at Qiaotou and Xinying are now cultural parks with narrow-gauge railways and, inevitably, sugar-based ice cream.

Rice wine and kaoliang are drunk as elsewhere in Taiwan, and the fierce sorghum spirit from Kinmen is the standard toast at a banquet.

Fruit wines from the southern orchards — lychee, mango, wax apple — are made at small wineries in Pingtung and Tainan counties and sold locally.

Coffee is genuinely southern: Taiwan grows arabica in the hills of Chiayi, Yunlin and Pingtung at altitude, and Kaohsiung and Tainan both have serious specialty coffee scenes.

Taiwanese craft beer is well represented in Kaohsiung’s Pier-2 district.