Taiwan

Taiwan is a street-food paradise, famous for beef noodle soup, soup dumplings, night markets, and bubble tea, which two teahouses, one in Taichung and one in Tainan, both claim to have invented in the mid-1980s. Chinese regional roots and Japanese influence meet in bold, snackable, endlessly inventive food.

Beef noodle soup is a post-1949 dish. It arrived with the Nationalist retreat, when well over a million mainlanders came to an island where beef was barely eaten, and the leading account traces the Sichuan-style version to military dependants' villages around Gangshan in the south, where the spicy broad-bean paste it depends on is a local speciality. That account is a scholar's argument, not a settled fact.

Fifty years of Japanese rule, from 1895 to 1945, left marks that outlasted it. The staple rice was switched from long-grain indica to Japanese short-grain japonica, which is still what Taiwan grows; miso, Japanese soy sauce and MSG entered the pantry; and the word for a cuisine, liaoli, is itself a Japanese borrowing.

A soft, chewy egg crepe rolled up and sliced, Taiwan's favorite hot breakfast off the griddle.