Taiwanese Bento Boxes

So when I was looking around for apartments in Taipei, I came to realize that it seems that all kitchens are very small here. In fact, a lot of the one bedroom apartments I saw only had one burner, and I was lucky if there were two burners. It seems as if the Taiwanese, or at least the people in Taipei, don't cook. Because of this, it seems that a lot of restaurants here cater to a lot of single diners, and they also make it very easy to get your food to go. Just like the dumplings I got that came in these small to go cardboard containers.

Well, one of my favorite "to go" dishes that I've been getting has been the Taiwanese bento box. If you go get chinese rice dishes in China, Hong Kong, or Singapore, very often, there is one main dish over rice and a sparse serving of vegetables. Yes, they can be very good, but there's not much variety. The great thing in Taiwan, is that there are a lot of Japanese influence, since it was a Japanese colony. The bento box, or Biandang (便當) as it known in Chinese, made its way from Japan to Taiwan in the early half of the 20th century - it's been popular ever since.

I'm pretty sure that all the dishes in a Taiwanese bento box is Chinese in origin, but it comes in Japanese packaging. It makes this rice dishes so much more interesting to be able to have all these different flavors come in a separate box designed for one person to eat. Very often in Chinese restaurant to have the full variety of flavors you need many people to eat the many dishes, but not when you have a Taiwanese bento box! Now the usual bento box here has your main protein, rice, some type of pickled vegetables, a stir fried vegetable, tofu and a whole egg. Now, mine pictured above has considerably more stuff there's more meat over my rice and some fish as well. I've been told that there are no hard a fixed rules to the bento box and each place does things a little differently.

So the bento box that I've been having the most is from Formosa Chang. At first I was confused by their covers, since they don't serve any pizza! But I recently found out that it's a chain all over Taiwan and they outsourced their design to a T-shirt company called Pizza Pizza Cut Five. I was disappointed to learn that it was some huge chain, because I thought I was frequenting some mom and pop joint, but I've gotten over it. More importantly, the place serves good food, it's cheap, and best of all... it's right near my apartment! The last point is quite important when you wanna just go out, grab something quick to eat and pass out on the couch.