There's one good reason to join the Taiwanese locals in the queue: vendors with a lot of customers do not only have a good reputation, but also a higher throughput of their ingredients, so everything tends to be more fresh. But you sometimes feel bad for the stand next to a popular one that offers the same kind of food without the lengthy wait and still gets widely ignored by the locals. Last November I visited three nightmarkets in Taipei on a streetfood speedrun: I was way too early at Shida nightmarket, so the ambiance suffered from a lack of crowds. Raohe night market on the other hand was crazy crowded at 6.30pm, and Ninxia night market was still very crowded at 9.15pm. To me, the crowds are part of a real nightmarket experience.
Lol! Yeah I refuse to line up for stuff in Taiwan. It can’t be THAT good can it? And then when you try it, it’s like… but this tastes the same as the other one..?? Maybe my palate isn’t refined enough
According to the law of diminishing return…yeah, I don’t always find it worthwhile, but some people just dig the hype and that 10% of taste improvements 😂
After nearly 2yrs here we stood in our first queue recently, 2 times in the same night actually. Once for Bearded Dragon Candy which happen to be the only stall selling the item and then queued up again for some delicious, perhaps the best, scallion pancake we've had to date. It made us reconsider lines altogether. We have avoided them for so long but this turned out to be worth it. Could be a fluke. We'll try again. Aren't night markets supposed to be busy and packed? Isn't that the point? ~JB 1st time seeing someone eat the pit of cherry on purpose. are there others of your kind? ;)
the "ganzhe zhi" you drank tasted like sugar water because "ganzhe" is "sugar can" and that's what sugar is made from in this part of the world. 😆 you sometimes see people selling the red sugar cans, which is probably something you haven't tried yet. i'm sure you can find some photos online if you are interested in finding out more. you don't actually eat them. you basically just suck the juice out of them. the one you tried was from green sugar cans, which are normally the ones used to make sugar. 😄
Ton chinois s'est vachement amélioré, bravo 🙇. La fille du premier stand en panique de devoir utiliser google mais pas besoin, tu sais dire sauce sésame en mandarin 😁
Singapore same, people queuing for food all the time. If the food is really good, I don't mind queueing for it. But it's quite disappointing if the food is bad and I had to queue for it. Preferably minimum queue, 10-15mins still acceptable. Going to Taiwan in April, can't wait. 😍😍
I can't answer your questions because I've never been to a night market! However, I do hate crowds. I live in a place (Yukon Territory, Canada) that has 0.1 people per square kilometer. Room to move!
