This article is still being written, this is just one quick passage. I just finished my trip to Taiwan and I won’t be able to write the entire Tainan travel guide until I get home.
Tainan is the oldest city in Taiwan and was once the capital, during imperialist times. It’s known for it’s history, it’s temples and it’s food!
Tainan Food Guide
If you are a foodie looking for the best foods, dinners, desserts and snacks in Tainan, you’ve found the right spot!
Best Desserts in Tainan
Looking for something sweet and but also local?
Do you like spicy?
Doga: Spiced Ice Cream
Invented 20 years ago, female founder Winson created signature spicy (and non-spicy) crackers made with the husk of a hallowed-out pepper.
Twenty years ago, she used to make Kim-Chi, a spicy, fermented Korean cabbage dish that aids digestion and good gut bacteria and tastes delicious, and sell it at the local night market. At the end of the day, after having hollowed out tons of chili peppers, she noticed how many pepper husks or skins she had left and felt bad about just wasting them.
How else could I use these, she thought, and at the age of 25, she came up with the idea to make an innovative savory snack from these skins. She filled the pepper shells with white sesame and turned them into spiced and spicy crackers! She switched to selling her signature crackers at the night market, and wanted to brand herself in a way that helped her be memorable. Having multiple talents, she hand-drew a bad-ass cartoon character that became her brand identity as well as part of her logo. She then named her brand after her grandmother, Doga.
About 10 years later, she worked her way up from a night market stand to an artistic storefront on the hip Anping Road in Tainan, where she invented the Spiced or Spicy Ice Cream. She took soft serve and added cereal to the bottom of the sundae, something akin to Trix cereal from the USA, then soft serve in the middle, then she sprinkles powdered spice of your choice on top of the sundae and the spiced cracker of your choice around the edges.
Sheriff’s Tea Eggs
20 years ago, a very kind policeman cooked Tea Eggs, a Taiwanese traditional food and snack, on the daily, and took them to work to share with hi co-workers for breakfast. Each day they’d tell him how delicious his Tea Eggs were and that he should open up his own shop one day. Ten years later, he did. And that’s how the first branded Tea Egg in Taiwan came to be.
Beefcake CoffeeShop
When he was very young, Danny, the younger of the two brothers, discovered he had a talent for taste. His pallet could decipher the finest and most complex of flavors. As he grew up, his raw talent for taste took him to the United States, in Long Beach California, where he became one of only a few Taiwanese citizens to attain the Q Grader Certificate, an almost mythical status within the coffee industry whereby you are able to analyze coffee through smell and taste alone, similar to a sommelier for wine.
David, the older brother, moved in Australia and worked with a winery for years, refining his pallet for smell and taste as well. This brought the duo to new heights as they both up-leveled their gustatory and olfactory skills, and they came to Tainan with both new skills and new passion.
