Gastro Monkey // 美食家

First time to Yilan and upon arrival, I realize just how little research I had done. I know they're famous for onions and wanted to try, but I couldn't find a restaurant that was close to the bus stop (arrives at the rear entrance of the train station so you have to walk a wide loop around). We decided to just walk down Linsen Road until we got to something. Of course, it's when you hope for random miracles that they don't occur, right? And, the hungrier you get, the more desperate you get also. We had a light snack in Taipei before hopping on the bus, so an hour later, we were hungry. We passed a bunch of fried chicken places that were all not open. On Foursquare, it looked like the places I had bookmarked all opened in the afternoon (night market snacks, restaurants). Apparently I didn't find anything that was open for lunch. Hungry and over it, we walked into 蟹老闆麵食館, or translated roughly, Crab Boss's Noodle Restaurant. It's not on Foursquare or Yelp...

If there's a Taiwanese restaurant that looks pretty close to the real thing, best believe I'm going to give it a try. When picking restaurants, I look at blogs/articles first to see. Why reinvent the wheel? I know I'm definitely not the first to find these places especially with blogging being so mainstream and everyday. From there, I check out Yelp reviews and look for pictures. Again, I don't rely solely on Yelp reviews. Even after reading reviews and blogs, I would suggest checking places out that may not have the best reviews, or average reviews because you never know! I am a big proponent of check it out for yourself.  I typically don't like menus that have too many options, but in this case, the pages of options that included Hakka food was too much to pass up. It just happened that we were in the Bay area for the CAAM Festival. Perfect opportunity to try a new place.  It was hard to choose what to order. Everything sounded so good. Firstly, I ended up ...