Taiwan
After getting flack from family for the previous day, decided to focus on local spots for food today. Knowing there is food everywhere, plenty of tiny places on the blocks literally across the street from the hotel... ended up ditching my research for milk tea (The Oolong Project?) and just walked instead. Found a hole in the wall called Beitou Black Tea, ended up being 1 liter of black tea with boba for NT 35 (!), and just a few storefront away was a sizzling black pepper steak place that was my actual plan for lunch. Splurged a bit on the NT 380 steak instead of the cheaper ones, and with my liter of tea it was pretty good.
Did not realize (until I walked in) that the steaks all came with a buffet-- popcorn, two kinds of soup, Taiwan toast with PB&J-- but that was kind of a nice touch? I knew Taiwan toast was a thing, but was not expecting peanut butter and jelly at a Taiwanese steakhouse.
Wandering the rest of the day was nothing too extravagant, ended up at my plan B for dinner. My original plan was a local dumpling place, but walked in there and saw it was empty, which seemed bad. Fortunately, like so much of Taipei, there are restaurants all over the place. Had previously found a place called Campfire Cafe in my searches; turned out it was more of a hang-out/study place that happened to also serve food, drink, and beer. The gyoza ended up being okay, even good, if you were expecting crispy bottoms, more in the Japanes style, and large-sized gyoza in the Taiwanese (not Japanese) style. The sliced pork rice bowl was pretty okay, might have been more intereting if I hadn't had so much pork the past two days.
More wandering after dinner, although not too much, given it was still hot and humid deep into the evening. The original plan actually had more things on the schedule, but was not able to get into the TSMC Museum of Innovation on this trip, and it turned out that Eika has a minimum booking of two people (doh!).