Grocery Shopping in Taipei

All the Food that’s Fit To
Fit in My Fridge

Written 2022

Summer is here. Local fruit stand sells hot pink dragonfruits, softball sized pineapples, watermelons, oblong papayas. For the first time in my life, I live in a non-temperate country. For the first time, I see banana trees next to homes and mango trees casually next to a coffee chain.

Cooking in Taipei is probably closer to what West extols the French and Japanese for: highly seasonal, fresh produce. Buy what you’ll cook that day. If only to prevent it all from rotting. This lifestyle is by necessity, my teeny, tiny fridge forces me to buy less. It can fit up to 3 or 4 meals worth of ingredients.

Grocery shopping in Taiwan is a multi-stop tour.

Sometimes I miss H-Mart, Trader Joe’s, Stop & Shop, Wegman’s, etc. as a Westerner, I miss being able to drop into one grocery and get everything.

I complained about grocery shopping to an American friend back home — how inefficient it is by comparison — a grocery run for me means 3 stores because of quality and availability. With the exception of Costco and Ikea, Taiwan really doesn’t have the square footage (ping) or the capitalism to really have a grocery store stuffed to the gills with THAT MUCH everything from everywhere all at once. (Should it?) Korean ingredients are surprisingly hard to access despite the simple two-hour flight to Incheon. (And there are no H-marts here for me to cry in…) Still, what it lacks in consistency and familiarity for me, the produce is exceptionally fresh and seasonal.

The maddening thing about Taipei is the lack of standardization for chains. Every PX Mart is organized differently. You never know what shelf the salt is. In this, I miss capitalism’s consistency: You know what you’re gonna get and where. Here, I have to visit at least three groceries in order to cook a meal like NYT’s Indian butter chickpeas or Korean dwenjang stew because sometimes one branch will not have an ingredient. They sell out or they don’t stock it because it’s not harvested this season. Or I can’t find it because the Chinese aisle signs are overwhelming.

Most Taipeirs don’t cook. Bentos are cheap. Like Japanese city workers, most students and workers pop into a 711, buy a tea egg, sweet potato, or chicken breast in a bag, and then ask the cashier to microwave it. I asked my Japanese classmate Yasuha, 32, if she cooks, and she said, No. She’s too afraid of cockroaches. (It’s a legitimate fear, especially in the older buildings. They’re so huge. I lose my marbles whenever I see roaches come at me in our little alleyway, which has street hawkers and restaurants on either side… )

My studio’s kitchen thankfully in a new building. It is outfitted with exactly one induction burner, one tiny box of a fridge with a bad freezer that allows for just about half a week of groceries. Gas cooktops in an earthquake prone country feels quite dangerous. Not to mention that the way they deliver gas feels dangerous and, to me, somewhat inefficient. It continues to be via an old man with 4 or 5 gas tanks on the back of his motorbike. Anyway, without further ado…

Grocery Stores of Taipei, an Annotated List

Carrefour

French chain. My local mainstay for all the essentials. It’s the closest (Others shop at PX Mart and those are a little cheaper. Like the Tesco’s to a Sainsbury’s.) Bit narrow. Good for seasonal fruit and vegetables, cilantro (hard to find), canned chickpeas and tomatoes (hard to find). US onions are cheaper than Taiwan’s onions. Cucumbers here (as in Korea) are about the same size as Persian cucumbers but skin spiny and prickly, so I’ve learned to use a vegetable peeler. Best brand is the one with a smiling lady with orange dyed hair hugging her basket of cucumbers.

Green & Safe

Local Taiwanese chain that’s a little like Whole Foods in ethos: organic, local.

  • scallion & nubs of ginger

  • delicious cow milk & eggs

  • cream cheese & tofu

Lots of frozen proteins, too, that I haven’t explored. Sometimes Taiwanese sweet potatoes, which are so, so delicious — creamy, sweet — and produce. A packet of tofu and ginger is about $1 USD. Tofu here is a revelation? Like I didn’t realize tofu should taste… this tofu-ey and flavorfull. Best egg brand is the six-pack with a smiling young man with hands outstretched. Eggs no longer rationed or completely sold out due to avian flu, but they are still about $4 for 6.

Mia C Bon (formerly Jason’s)

Owned by Carrefour now. The most expensive of the chains because they sell international goods, including Italian olive oil, Japanese snacks, Korean gochujang. I get my bougie New Zealand granola, Twinings tea, Taiwan-grown prize-winning rice with the blue Belgian ribbon.

The Japanese department stores like Sogo and Breeze

For specialty, foreign imported ingredients from Europe, Japan, Korea, the US… I found really expensive, delicious Spanish olive oil. Award-winning! Once I bought a box of sad, wilted, overpriced Korean perilla leaf because I’ve never seen it sold anywhere else. I’ve seen perilla leaf at the Jiangguo flower market, so maybe when we move into our larger place, I can start growing it on the porch! Being locked out of diplomatic recognition means that the agriculture is still grown for and eaten by locals.

New grocery store unlocked! Little Burma

Felt like dancing when J’s friend introduced us to Little Burma, and this grocery store which had a whole wall of spices! He, Malaysian/Singaporean, 35, lived in the Middle East for work and understands how cooking, spices, are so important to feeling at home in a new home. And I found cans of Arroy D coconut milk (exceptionally good for baking and cooking) for so cheap. This is the kind of ethnic grocery store NYC has so many of. Taiwanese food, at least in Taipei, tends to shy away from spices except that five-spice blend which I can’t I’m sorry, no garlic, cilantro, onion (are you sure you want onion?), dried lemongrass, chili peppers, shallots, etc… so eating Burmese food where they just dumped in all teh spices and red without watering it down also gave me the CRUNCH the PUNCH that I’d been looking for all this time in Taiwan. Anyway, I got Thai jasmine rice (also hard to find), fenugreek seeds, green cardamom. We talked about how to use the cardamom (chai masala). When I talked wistfully about the zaa’tar from farmers market back in Port, he said that he got a huge bag from Jordanian friend visiting.

Our House (Korean)

Their homemade kimchi is 150, $3, for a pint. I tasted the grocery store Kimchi from Jongga (really?) and they’ve got a weird sweetness and MSGness.

Family Mart

Japanese chain. Plays a jingle every time a customer enters that must haunt the dreams of convenience store employees. Smells like tea eggs. I like their seasonal fruit juices, especially passionfruit juice, pongan juice,

Rumors of a good Indonesian grocery store at the basement of Taipei Main Station, which is extremely confusing to navigate because they just built one building on top of another building on top of three basement levels, so you can imagine… The elderly seem to still frequent traditional wet markets and fruit stalls and street sellers.

Next up:

Subtropical kitchen lessons. Bread goes bad overnight. Keep bread and produce refrigerated! Eat leftovers quickly: within 2-4 days. Taiwan uses less preservatives in its sauces and stuff. It’ll go bad.

U.S. Packing List. I packed Burlap & Barrel spices from US. Attempted to bring small marble mortar & pestle made in India that I found at TJ Maxx.

My Taiwan kitchen kit. My Bought Zojirushi rice cooker, Chimei hot water kettle. Steel Taiwan doesn’t get name brand stuff, they have to make their own extremely sensible, staid steel stuff. Imports from Europe and Japan come through. But I didn’t realize until now how New York has access to SO Much. Food-grade steel is 301. Most kitchens do not have dish washers, they have dish dryers / UV sterilizers given how humid it gets here, mold grows everywhere, and Taiwan is generally more environmentally friendly.