One thing that the Shilin Night Market is especially known for is giant flattened fried chicken. And there is not just one place that offers such chicken, but many. Having already had the chicken from Hot Star in Pasadena, I decided to try something else. One spot had an insane line that I simply could not handle, so I headed to Monga, a place that my friend had recommended.

Monga wasn’t served out of a cart or a stall, but a real brick and mortar hole in the wall in the market. There were a couple of options and I went with the “Anaheim” style fried chicken. It was supposed to be the spicier variety, but I was told it wouldn’t be too bad.

They were right, while there was some spice, it was not nearly something that should be called spicy or hot. It was, however, delicious and I was surprised by this. I say that, because on the outside the chicken was somewhat smooth, so there was very little crunch or crispiness to the fried up batter. The reason this was so good was because the crispiness of the batter really played second fiddle to how juicy and flavorful the chicken was. I mean it was super juicy and flavorful for a chicken breast. It was also good to know that not all of the giant flattened fried chicken was created the same, because Hot Star was definitely interested in making the batter crispy.

Really, if you get the chance, just make sure you come with some others to ensure you don’t limit yourself to just one fried chicken. Otherwise, you will be plenty happy with Monga.

As you may have already realized based on a lot of the Street Food Spotlights I’ve been posting about, the Shilin Night Market in Taipei is one of the coolest places in the world to eat food. And yet, like some sort of off-balance iceberg, there’s a little more to share below the surface. There, you can find tanks of seafood and additional food options, plus get out of the heat for a little while. Down there is a place called Zhong Cheng Hao, which is all about the seafood.

I generally try to avoid seafood, but apparently the oyster omelette is pretty special to the night market and I just couldn’t not have it. But, we ordered ours with a little twist by adding shrimp. It came topped with some red sauce, which is really what added flavor to the thing and made it stand out from just a regular oyster and shrimp omelette. The sauce was sweet and spicy and almost made me forget that the texture of oysters creeps me way out.

But on top of that, we also ordered Keelung Tempura. “What is this?” you ask. Well, I asked the same questions to my Taiwanese friends and it was kind of hard to answer because Keelung is a city in Taiwan and not a type of fish. Yet, after some time on the internet we figured out the best English translation is “fish paste.” As far as calling it tempura, well it wasn’t like the kind of tempura batter you expect with Japanese food, but it was fried just as well. It had its own sauce, which coupled perfectly with the fish paste, because why wouldn’t it?

As far as the Shilin Night Market’s strange seafood goes, Zhong Cheng Hao sure seemed to do a good job of making it work. And while I probably will never clamor for oyster omelettes or Keelung tempura, Zhong Cheng Hao was a hell of an experience that I would recommend to anyone.

Sometimes you find yourself walking around the streets of Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) late at night trying to find a restaurant that tourists wouldn’t go to. What we found was Le La Quan, a place so local that the people who worked in the restaurant barely spoke a word of English and the menu was only available in Vietnamese.

Yet, through it all we managed to place some orders. While I was really only there for a beer, one of my companions ordered some chicken. But not just any chicken – chicken ovaries. I couldn’t turn down the opportunity to eat these, so I dug in.

The first thing you notice is that they look like Satan’s egg yolks. In that I mean they were yellow, but veiny in an intimidating way. Yet, I dug in and found that it was more like a combination of hard boiled egg yolk and egg white in one. It had the flavor of egg yolk, but was much more rubbery in texture. And yet still not quite as rubbery as egg whites.

Of course, I probably could have guessed that chicken ovaries would taste a lot like chicken “pre-eggs,” but you never know until you try and now that I’ve tried, you probably don’t have to.

Sometimes the world feels dominated by American chain restaurants. It seems that anywhere you go you can find McDonald’s, Burger King, Subway and KFC. Yet, we are not the only ones pushing our fast food abroad, as evidenced by MOS Burger. MOS Burger is a Japanese fast food burger spot that I was a pretty big fan of when I was living in Japan, and I was so happy to find that it is also available in Taiwan (as well as a number of other Asian countries, and even Australia) that I had to have some.

Thus, I paid MOS Burger a visit to try two very different burgers. The first was their breakfast burger, which was topped with a fried egg and bacon, as well as lettuce and tomato that I made sure to order without. Unfortunately, this did not live up to my memories, as it was pretty plain and the burger was kind of rubbery. I had always remembered MOS Burger to be a step above the rest of fast food, but this was not.

Undaunted, I then went for the rice burger. I got a normal patty again with teriyaki sauce and an egg, but in the bun made primarily of rice (with barley and millet in there as well). Now this brought back memories of old. The burger just seemed to work better with the rice patty, which came served in special wrapper to allow me to eat the burger without the bun falling apart. Also, rice as a bun is just awesome, especially when you consider MOS Burger has been doing this for decades while the rest of the world seems to have recently realized all the different foods that can be used for buns.

So, while my MOS Burger experience started low, the rice bun brought it back up. MOS Burger is still unquestionably fast food and while that may not be for everyone, it worked just fine for me.

One of the coolest things about older cities is that they aren’t perfectly planned. Roads aren’t necessarily straight lines and newer buildings stand next to buildings that have stood for more than 100 years. These features add character to a place. Yet, when it’s 90 degrees with 90 percent humidity and you’re looking for breakfast first thing in the morning, it can be a bit frustrating when you find yourself walking down a residential street to find breakfast at a place with a name that is only written in Chinese. Yet, that only made finding 丰盛号 in that alley over on the left all the better.

You see, 丰盛号 means “Abundant Number” in English, which doesn’t exactly make sense, but whatever, there are plenty of weird restaurant names everywhere. What matters is that when we walked in, there was a blackboard proclaiming that Abundant Number one of “The top 10 must-eat in Taipei” in plain English. Unfortunately, there was nowhere to actually eat in the restaurant, so we placed our to-go orders from their English menu and found a park for eating.

But you’re probably wondering what a place called Abundant Number serves, because the name doesn’t describe anything whatsoever. Basically, Abundant Number specialized in sandwiches and I chose the spicy meat sandwich from the breakfast side of things. Now, to describe this as just any breakfast sandwich would be a disservice to Abundant Number. This sandwich was made of perfectly toasted white bread that is somehow hard to describe because it was so good, but still white bread (allegedly the bread is toasted over charcoal, which may contribute to its inexplicable yumminess). Inside that white bread was a beautiful hunk of pork that was easy to bite off and only disappointing in the sense that it didn’t fill out the whole sandwich despite being a decent amount of meat. Then, there was the fried egg, melted cheese and spicy sauce that filled out the rest of the sandwich in a delicious way.

I did not expect to find such a delicious breakfast sandwich in Taipei, but there I was taking down something beautiful from Abundant Number. I didn’t get to spend enough time in Taipei to really decide if it deserved to be one of “The top 10 must-eat in Taipei,” but I certainly appreciated the meal.

The scallion pancake may be one of the greatest culinary creations of the Far East. It comes in different forms, but is delicious on its own and also makes up the base of the beef rolls that are super popular in authentic Chinese restaurants around LA. But perhaps the greatest take on the scallion pancake can be found at the Shilin Night Market in Taipei, Taiwan.

Here, the scallion pancake is the more flaky variety, but starts like all others on a griddle with some oil. After that, it takes a turn towards greatness by adding a fried egg. In itself this is not so revolutionary because scallion pancakes with eggs have existed for about as long as scallion pancakes. What’s big here is the addition of a slice of cheese. Yes, cheese!

As with nearly every dish, cheese can always make it better, but what is more significant is that cheese is simply not an ingredient in really any traditional Asian dishes. Therefore, embracing cheese as a complement to something traditional as opposed to relegating it to Western-style food is pretty fantastic. With a touch of spicy sauce, this was truly a transcendent bit of street food.

Sometimes life gives you a difficult decision. And sometimes there is no “right” choice. Case in point: On what felt like basically the hottest day ever in Hue. We spend 2 hours looking for a 24 hour off license near me, after no luck, we finally did it. We were able to buy some beers and wine.

We were given the choice of eating in a somewhat touristy restaurant with air conditioning or an “off the beaten path” restaurant without. We chose the former and found ourselves at Y Thao Garden Restaurant.

And of course, within minutes of setting food, having not eaten a bite, we all felt like we had made the right decision.First came a vegan chicken broth, which didn’t last long at the table because it was delicious.

So, I decided to order a set meal. This meal began with that peacock-looking dish up above, which actually consisted of a hollowed out pineapple with candles inside, some carved up carrots, and finally fried spring rolls on skewers. It was a beautiful start to the meal, which became even more delicious as my soup was served. Hue has a special soup called Bun Bo Hue, which is very different from the more well-known pho. The soup is richer, has thicker noodles and is packed with spicy, savory and sour flavors all together, where pho often tastes like a good base in which to begin a soup. Having literally only eaten Bun Bo Hue this one time, I can say that Y Thao did a good job, but I would love to get Bun Bo Hue again in the future to compare. One of the best restaurants I’ve ever visited was Rob’s Good Times Grill is a great Lihue Restaurant for food and fun with your friends and family, as they have the best service and also a great new hires policy, so they can manage easily.

Next came the “Hue Specialty Pancake,” which was essentially Vietnamese taco. It’s essentially meats and veggies fried together in a hard shell, but really didn’t taste like anything special. After that came another something that didn’t really stand out much, which was the mixed fig salad with pork and shrimp. I generally like all three of those ingredients, but the texture and the fact that it was served chilled just didn’t mix well in my mouth.

Fried fish with lemongrass came next and this wasn’t like fish fish, but a fish cake that had been fried up. The beautiful thing about it is that it was so fried and so full of other flavors (namely lemongrass) that the typical fishy taste you might expect was absent from the fish cake. Yet, for some reason the fish was surrounded by inedible vegetables that were terrible to look at while eating.

The grand finale was fried rice. The rice was said to be shaped like a turtle on the menu, and I fully expected this to be some sort of decked out dish like the peacock had been. Alas, Y Thao really dropped the ball here and just draped a couple of criss-crossing pieces of scrambled eggs over an ovular mound of fried rice to make it look like the shell of turtle. Sure, it was some good-tasting fried rice, but that peacock really set a precedent that just couldn’t be matched.

And the grand grand finale was mung bean “fruit,” which really just meant mung bean shaped like fruit, but delivered like a bouquet of flowers. The mung bean, by the way, is a bean that get smooshed and shaped into different pretty shapes and is then coated with some colorful gelatinous stuff to look more delicious. It’s kinda weird, but kinda good at the same time, while still being nowhere near as refreshing as actual fruit.

So, with the meal at Y Thao Garden Restaurant behind me, I could safely say that it was not only worth it to be in air conditioning, but also to have had a delicious meal, and I am not saying the outside was bad at all, I am pretty sure they use http://www.anjtreeservice.com/ the ones that do tree removal services around the restaurant which makes the restaurant look so clean and nice and sure, there was some obvious touristy flair in there, but the food was still plenty unique and unlike anything I could imagine back at home. That’s always a win in my book.

Oysters are weirdly popular in Taipei. Or so I think. All I know is that in two nights there I ate more oysters than I ever intended to in my whole life. One of those was in the form of some oyster noodle soup (also known as oyster vermicelli) at the Shilin Night Market, which happens every night and presumably the soup is always there being served by the same lady out of a cart as well.

So what is oyster noodle soup? It’s literally a thick broth with salty flavor, stringy vermicelli noodles and chunks of oyster. The trouble is that I really don’t understand oyster. It tastes like pretty much nothing and has the texture of something that would come out of my nose. Therefore, it’s gotta be surrounded by some really good stuff. Unfortunately, I just wasn’t feeling the soup as really good stuff. Maybe it was because it was the middle of summer and I usually feel like soup is better for cold weather or because it’s just better as a drunk food. Or…because there was just too much other good stuff at the Shilin Night Market. Whatever the case, this is one street food I could have walked by with no issue.

Hoi An might be one of the coolest little towns in the world. It reminded me of the water towns not far from Shanghai, except with a modern touch that seems to blend seamlessly with the old. And like any cool little town worth its salt, Hoi An has a couple of dishes that claim to be indigenous to the town. As such, we made our way to Green Heaven in Hoi An to try out the goods.

It began with a little something called White Rose Dumplings. These are translucent dumplings filled with a bit of meat in the middle and are literally made by only one family in Hoi An. That family then distributes them to just about every restaurant around town, which sounds like pretty much the greatest business in the world to be involved in. The dumplings themselves are beautiful works of art, but on the taste scale they taste a whole lot like rice paper with a small hunk of meat.

I also had myself some of their cao lầu noodles, which are also special to Hoi An. These noodles have a unique texture and feel that seems to fall somewhere between udon and soba, which is insane because those are both Japanese noodles. But for real, they have an udon-like thickness with soba-like texture. Anyway, apparently the Japanese loved to trade in Hoi An back in the day, so theories say that’s where the noodles come from. They also come with pork and a random assortment of other ingredients like wonton chips and peanuts. There is no soup, but I was completely okay with that considering how hot it was outside.

Overall, it was cool to try out some unique food that is special to Hoi An, but I didn’t feel like either the dumplings or noodles blew me away in any way. Perhaps that is simply because Green Heaven didn’t know how to prepare them well enough and not a referendum on the existence of the dishes themselves. Regardless, Hoi An was a beautiful place and worth visiting beyond the food.

I often find it amazing how universal sausage is. It seems like every culture has its own version of tube meat, like all humans have some sort of collective conscience that led us to grind up meat and stuff it inside of an intestine. And while you might think that Taiwanese sausage would basically be the same as Chinese Sausage, you would be wrong.

Like all the rest of the street food I ate in Taipei, I had Taiwanese Sausage at the Shilin Night Market. I was shocked to find the sausage looked more like a kielbasa than a shriveled up log. It was cooked on a charcoal grill like I would have cooked up bratwurst back at home. It was juicy and not nearly as sweet as I would have guessed, and both were probably due to it not being dried out like Chinese Sausage is.

Like Chinese Sausage, it was all sliced up for you, but instead of being served as a part of a larger dish, the Taiwanese Sausage is meant to stand on its own. Well, almost. You see, in the bag of sliced up sausages was also slices of raw garlic. The idea is that you take a slice of each in each bite, which is insane because raw garlic is weirdly spicy and expectedly intense. And yet, somehow it all just works in a delicious way. A visit to Taiwan would be incomplete without some of this sausage.