Taipei Travel

You can spend the whole night walking around the night market with so much food. There are some game stalls as well. XXL fried chicken is must try.

I love night markets. I love street food. So I was excited to go to Shilin. However, I left after just an hour because I was so overwhelmed by the crowds. This was a Sunday at 6:30 pm, I can only imagine it gets worse later on. Admittedly I don’t love crowds but I can tolerate when necessary. There were parts of this market where you literally could only move an inch at a time because you were packed like sardines. I was just looking for an exit. There were some slightly quieter alleys I tried to stay on. But if you want good local street food, there are other night markets closer in to central Taipei and not as crowded. If you’ve been to a night market in Asia before, Shilin is the same thing, only really big. Go if you have time and are willing to put up with the crowds, but it’s not the only way to experience a local market (in fact, you can hardly call Shilin a local market anyway).

This a large market near Jiantan MRT station with all sorts of food and other stalls. It is, inevitably, rather crowded and so extensive that it needs 2-3 hours to do it justice and soak up the atmosphere so is best avoided by anyone who cannot comfortably walk and stand for this length of time. Although limited English is spoken it is easy to order food and the prices are so low that it is a great opportunity to buy a portion of a lot of different dishes (even if, sometimes, we had little idea what we were buying). We would buy one small portion of a dish and then share it and found that the the dishes we tried ranged from OK to excellent. Even if we had found something we really did not like, we would have spent less than £1.50 on it. Even the stinky tofu (which does not smell appetising) was surprisingly tasty, especially when eaten with Tiawanese Kimchi. The only unpleasant part was the basement food court, unless you enjoy being accosted by stallholders every step of the way (it was even worse than Canary Islands time share touts in the 1990s) and we would suggest that it is better to avoid it and just enjoy the rest of it.

It has somehow changed a bit with a Basement food area but it still retains it's charm of being one of the most popular night market.

Do you want tons of street food and souvenirs? Of course, you do!! Be sure to check out Shilin Night Market. It was my favorite market to visit while in Taipei even with the rain. I recommend buying a fresh fruit drink and roasted chestnuts. There are so many things you can buy while at the market for tourist shopping. Be sure to check out the dong pineapple cakes.