EP.2 Street Food Around The World in Taiwan - JAPAN

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Welcome back to a new episode from our Street Food Around the World in Taiwan series. In episode 2, we are taking you to JAPAN! Japan colonized Taiwan for 50 years and has influenced Taiwan in many ways. Because of this, Japanese culture and authentic FOOD can be found around every corner! We are first going to Beitou, which is a hot spring district that was developed by the Japanese into a retreat.
We start at Beitou Museum, to see some Japanese architecture. This building is the last two-storey Japanese built building in the country, and used to house Japanese kamikaze pilots before their final flights. After checking out the unique building features, we went inside the Beitou Museum restaurant to have a traditional Japanese Kaiseki (multi course meal). The Kaiseki featured 8 different seasonal dishes and oolong tea. The price of the meal was 956 NTD each (USD $32.20), which included the entry to the museum.
A must-see in Beitou is the hot springs!!! The activity of soaking in hot springs is a popular Japanese activity, and “onsens” can be found everywhere in Japan. We went to Marshal Zen Garden, another old Japanese retreat with an interesting history. Here, we rented a private hot spring room. It featured a hot bath (rich with minerals) and a cold bath. It was 1 hour of pure relaxation with a gorgeous view over Beitou. The room we rented cost 1500 NTD per hour (USD $50.53) for two people.
Next, we checked out a Japanese-era temple dedicated to Guanyin known as Puji Temple. You can see that many of the architectural design features of the temple are Japanese, mainly the design of the roof.
After exploring Beitou, we went back into Taipei for more Japanese food. Our next restaurant was a street food oden stall. The oden was quite different from the Taiwanese style which can be found in the night markets and fish markets. You can order fish cakes, tofu, daikon radish, vegetables, and it is as authentic as oden stalls we have visited in Osaka! They even serve it with a spicy mustard! We paid 140 NTD (USD $4.71) for our bowl.
To finish our day of eating Japanese street food, we went to a local izakaya (Japanese bar). This izakaya’s specialty is Hiroshima okonomiyaki, with decor (and beer) from Okinawa. The okonomiyaki is made with a batter, crunchy vegetables, soba noodles, bacon and a fried egg stacked together as a pancake. It is topped with a special okonomiyaki sauce, mayonnaise and pickled ginger (260 NTD / USD $8.75). We also ordered chicken meatballs (240 NTD / USD $8.07) and our favorite Japanese drinks: overflowing sake and ginger highball! And what makes this izakaya special is they offer a dice rolling game. If you roll two 1’s, you get a free drink, if you roll an even number you get 50% off your drink, and if you roll an odd number, you must buy the mega sized drink! We got 50% off of our Orion beer!
Restaurant Information:
1. Beitou Museum
No. 32, Youya Road, Beitou District, Taipei
2. Marshal Zen Garden
No. 34, Youya Road, Beitou District, Taipei
3. Puji Temple
No. 112, Wenquan Road, Beitou District, Taipei
4. 角屋關東煮
Lane 141, Section 2, Da'an Road, Da’an District, Taipei
5. Teppan Izakaya
No. 13, Lane 265, Section 2, Dunhua South Road, Da’an District, Taipei
Thank you so much for watching! If you are enjoying this series, make sure to subscribe and turn on post notifications so that you don’t miss an episode! Stay tuned because we will be taking you to a NEW country in the next episode!
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We’re Luke Martin and Sabrina Davidson, food lovers and world travellers! We make videos about local, authentic and unique foods from across the globe. We particularly like to sample street food across Asia. We are based in Taiwan where we frequent the best Taiwanese street food stops and create travel content to make finding food in Taiwan easier for YOU! Although we are based in Taiwan we travel the majority of the year around the world in search of the best food. We’ve filmed in Japan, The Philippines, Malaysia, Hong Kong, South Korea, Indonesia, India, Turkey, Lebanon, Palestine, The Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Greece, Sri Lanka, Canada and the list is still growing! Our mission is to create content that is entertaining, informative, honest and fun! We love what we do and we are always grateful for your support! Thank you and see you on the next episode!
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