Tom Parker Bowles, a food critic for Esquire magazine, recently gave Taiwan’s food scene a rave review in an article titled “How Taiwan became the hottest food destination on Earth,” published in last month’s issue of the British magazine.
Bowles’ mother, Camilla, is married to Britain’s Prince Charles.
Bowles’ trip to Taiwan, a nation in which the Esquire editors said, “even the offal tastes divine,” and his resulting six-page article, are expected to boost interest in Britain about visiting the nation.
He wrote that his good impression of Taiwan started from “those gentle smiles at customs, and the sense of heartfelt welcome, such blessed contrast to the blank-faced, purse-lipped suspicion of mainland China.”
In contrast to Shanghai, “a place of both thrusting, gleaming modernity and incomprehensibly alien froideur,” he found Taipei “modest, discreet, mainly grey and sprawling” and “far less frenetic and sultry than Bangkok, slower moving than Hong Kong, and rather more approachable than Tokyo.”
Impressed by an integration of gourmet foods in Taiwan that he wrote was a result of history and conflicting ideas over sovereignty, Bowles said both wealthy and ordinary people are able to find their favorite foods here.
The food critic detailed the food he ate during his trip to Taiwan last month, including chicken soup and pig’s foot, “two fairly everyday dishes” that he said are taken “to the most heady and astonishing heights,” in Taiwan.
Chicken soup is “no ordinary broth, rather a two-day cooked version famed across the land,” Bowles said, noting that the soup has “the most profound chicken tang, and sumptuous depth and extraordinary richness.”
“So much so that I want to strip off, jump in and wallow in this umami-tinged magic. But that might be frowned upon. Instead, I moan and coo and gasp and sigh and slurp. The soup has the texture of liquid silk and the taste of poultry paradise,” he said.
“Pork belly rice, soothing comfort, with slivers of soft skin and chopped mushrooms and soy; a peppery, beef filled pastry, a cousin of our own Cornish pastry; crisp, deep-fried, paper-thin sheets of dried beef with a cinnamon tang; ba-wan (肉圓) hulking great meatballs, the size of a heavyweight’s fist, wrapped in a chewy, glutinous skin. And stinky tofu. Bloody stinky tofu, whose shitty, tropical sewer stench permeates the air for miles around,” the gourmet wrote.
“Taipei might not be the most seductive of cities. It doesn’t fight to lure you in, or tempt one with illicit thrills, but this beauty comes from within. Taiwan’s strengths are its people, its food, its huge and generous heart,” Bowles wrote in the conclusion. “I was genuinely sad to leave. Taipei’s charms might be subtle but, no doubt about it, they definitely grab you by the gut.”
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