Raohe Night Market 饒河夜市 

Raohe Night Market has the most impressive entrance to a night market in Taiwan.  Located next to the Ciyou Temple and guarded by a spectacular looking gate, I had been anticipating my visit to Raohe Night Market ever since I knew I was headed back to Taipei.

Pepper Buns 胡椒餅
The market has a huge variety of food and I was able to try many new snacks for the first time. One of the must try items on my list was the Pepper Buns.  The stall was right at the entrance and there was a long line of people waiting to purchase these.  I’ve seen this place on various TV shows before and it is always packed with people.  You could also tell that they were popular because there were more people working at this stand than any other food stand I’d seen at a night market.

The buns are $50NTD each and the filling of the bun is a mixture of meat, green onions and pepper.  Once the dough is stuffed with the meat mixture, it is thrown into what looked like an Uyghur oven.  Many people have said that the popularity of these buns is due to the very strong pepper taste.  Personally, I’m not a huge fan of green onions and the pepper taste was a bit much for me and I would rather spend $50NTD on something else.  To be fair, we did purchase one of these to take back to our hotel to eat.  Perhaps I would have had a better opinion about it had I tried it there, fresh out of the oven.

Diced Beef 火焰骰子牛
The literal translation of the name of this stall is Flame Diced Beef.  It was the first time we were trying diced beef and because we liked it so much, we subsequently tried it at almost every night market we went to hereafter.

   

The picture of the final product doesn’t look that great, but I assure you, it was one of the best things we had that night.

Deep Fried Squid
It was my first time trying deep fried squid at a night market.  The sign says that it is made to order and sure enough, we watched the entire process from start to finish. 

   

We got to choose from a variety of seasoning and we stuck to the traditional lemon flavour.  The squid was tender and seasoned just right.  It was my second favourite thing after the diced beef.

Grass Jelly & Pig’s Blood
After purchasing our squid, we decided to sit down and have a bowl of grass jelly.  We figured we needed something cool to wash down all the fried food we’ve had so far.  We ordered the second item on the menu which came with mung beans and peanuts.  That was a bit different as I’d always just eaten grass jelly plain.

After sitting down, we spotted a stall selling Pig’s blood and decided to purchase one to try.  Taiwanese night markets are famous for Duck’s blood, but we couldn’t seem to find this, so we stuck with Pig’s blood, which was very well seasoned and much better than I expected.

We were about to head back to the hotel but wanted to buy some luo mei (滷味) to take back with us.  We came across this stall and we decided on a mixture of a few items including cucumbers and tofu.  It wasn’t my favourite luo mei mixture and we actually ended up throwing most of it out after leaving it in our fridge for a few days.

One thing I didn’t like too much about Raohe Night Market is that the stalls are placed very closely together.  It was quite crowded on the night we went and it was really difficult to walk through the market.  The distance between the stalls were probably no more than 6-8 feet wide.

Getting There
Take the West Railway Line to Songshan Railway Station and then walk about 3 minutes to reach the entrance.  Songshan MRT Station was still being constructed when I was there, but once that is operating, the market is only a couple of blocks from Exit 3.