Eastern Taiwan Food & Traditional Cuisine

Eastern food is the least Chinese cooking in Taiwan, because the strongest tradition here is indigenous.

Amis cooking in particular is built on wild vegetables — ferns, bitter melon leaves, shepherd’s purse, tree buds, betel flower — gathered rather than farmed, and often bitter in a way Han Taiwanese food is not. The Amis are sometimes said to eat more plant species than any other people in Taiwan, and a village market is genuinely an education.

Millet rather than rice is the traditional staple in the mountains, used for wine, cakes and ritual, though rice has largely displaced it for everyday eating.

Cooking methods are direct: grilling over wood, boiling in a pot, stone-boiling in a hollowed trough, and wrapping food in leaves. Preservation by salting and fermenting is important — silaw, salted raw pork fermented in a jar, is an Amis speciality that visitors either take to or do not.

Alongside this, the rift valley grows what many Taiwanese consider the island’s best rice.

Amis wild vegetable dishes are the regional signature — a plate of gathered greens, often with a deliberate bitterness, served alongside grilled meat and rice. Jia nan, the ten-vegetable soup, is the classic version.

Chishang bento is an institution: a wooden box of rift-valley rice with braised pork, egg and pickles, sold on the railway platform at Chishang since the Japanese period and now a nationally recognised brand. The rice is the point.

Hualien mochi — soft glutinous rice cakes filled with peanut, sesame or red bean — is the gift everyone brings back from the east.

Stone hotpot, an Amis method in which fire-heated stones are dropped into a wooden or betel-sheath vessel to boil a soup of fish and wild greens, is served at village restaurants and is worth seeking out.

Flying fish on Orchid Island, caught in season and dried on racks, is central to Tao food and ritual.

Also: bianshi dumplings in Hualien, daylily dishes from Liushidan in August, and Taitung’s rice-flour noodles.

Village markets are the thing to seek out. The Amis market in Hualien city and the roadside stalls along the coast sell gathered wild vegetables, freshwater crabs, betel flower and things that appear in no supermarket, and stallholders will explain what to do with them if you ask.

Dongdamen night market in Hualien is the region’s largest and includes a dedicated indigenous section with grilled meat, millet wine and stone hotpot — unusual for a Taiwanese night market and the best single introduction to the food.

Homestays are where the best eating happens. Rift-valley and village guesthouses typically cook two meals a day from what is around, and this is a considerably better proposition than most restaurants.

Chishang has built a small industry on its rice, with fields you can walk through and shops selling it by variety.

Buy directly from roadside stalls along Highway 11 and 9 — custard apples, pineapples, daylilies and honey, depending on the season.

Eastern Taiwan has no grape-wine tradition, but it has the island’s most distinctive drinking culture in millet wine.

Millet wine is the indigenous drink across the Amis, Bunun, Truku and Puyuma communities — brewed from glutinous millet, cloudy, sweet-sour and low in alcohol, and historically made by women for ritual use. It is central to harvest festivals and to hospitality, and refusing a cup offered in a village is awkward. Commercial versions are sold everywhere in the east; the home-brewed ones are better and are usually only encountered as a guest.

Rice wine is made in the rift valley, and several small distilleries around Hualien and Taitung produce it alongside fruit liqueurs.

Daylily, plum and custard-apple wines are local products sold at farm shops.

The region is also a serious coffee and tea producer — Luye plateau tea in Taitung, and arabica grown on the eastern slopes — and Dulan has a small but real cafe culture.