I’ve been covering Taiwanese food for decades now, and for as long as I’ve been a writer, night markets have served as shorthand for Taiwanese street culture.
They are the backdrop to every travel video about Taiwan and the place every first-time visitor is told to go—to me, it almost feels cliché. I’ve lived in Taipei for five years, and few things catch me off guard at night markets anymore. However, at Ningxia Night Market in Taipei, I recently found myself pleasantly surprised.
Smack in the middle of the market, up a narrow staircase above the stalls, sits a dining room called the Thousand-Year Banquet. Here, the choreography is reversed: instead of weaving through crowds with plates balanced in hand, I sat in an air-conditioned room while the market’s best dishes came to me.
The reservation-only project was launched by the Ningxia Night Market Development Association in 2010 as a way to spotlight its veteran vendors. The name comes from arithmetic: add up the years these families have been in business, and you arrive at close to a millennium of street food cooking knowledge and know-how.
Each course is dispatched from a different stall downstairs. Highlights include a fried chicken cutlet the size of a paperback novel, an oyster omelet molten at its center, deep-fried spring rolls wrapped in caul fat—carried up and plated with surprising formality. It’s a tasting menu without a chef, stitched together from the market’s greatest hits.
Taiwanese night markets have a long history. They began as evening bazaars next to temples, where hawkers sold cloth, tools, and secondhand goods. Food was incidental at first, but by the mid-20th century, eating had become the main attraction.
In the last two decades, though, the atmosphere has shifted. Rising rents, gentrification, and the pressure of tourism have hollowed many of them out. Chain operators dominate stalls once run by families, and many dishes are perfected for efficiency rather than charm or character.
Ningxia, located in Taipei’s Datong District, is one of the rare exceptions. It spans a single block, but the density of legacy stalls here is astonishing, and it’s one of the few places where many are still family-run. Generations still work the same woks, and fry oyster omelets and ladle out bowls of fish ball soup the exact same way their grandparents did. Walking its tight lanes, you can feel a sense of continuity and tradition.
And yet, even here, the crowds can be exhausting, especially on the weekends. Personally, I’ve lost my appetite for elbowing past people in the humid heat. Upstairs, the Thousand-Year Banquet offers a clever solution: a spacious dining room in which guests are pampered with tableside service and fed the full spectrum of street food bites.
Of course, for most visitors, the very act of lining up, sweating, and weaving through stalls is part of the magic of visiting Taiwan. However, the Thousand-Year Banquet has the same bites and flavors, but from the vantage point of a very comfortable chair—it’s an itinerary of small thrills and great food, just without the chaos.
A table reservation for 10 people (it is a banquet after all) starts at 10,000 New Taiwan Dollars (about $218 USD). You can make a booking through Klook or the experience’s reservation website.
