Miaoli, Western Taiwan - Hakka cuisine & dancing dragons heaven

Call me biased, but as my wife's home town is Miaoli, I am going to feature a posts about this place frequently, as I had found, that typical tourist guides, like praised Lonely Planet typically ignores this place in Western Taiwan.

Miaoli County is located at the mid-north of Taiwan . Its northern and northeastern border is Hsinchu County. Its southern and southeastern parts connect with Taichung County, but in between, separated by Da-an River and the Snow Mountain Ranges.  Topographically, Miaoli is divided into four landforms: plain, hill, platform and mountain ranges. Apart from platform, other landforms are regularly arrayed in good order from the west to the east.
Here is again a graphical view:

 
he name Miaoli was coined using two Hakka words, cat (貓) and raccoon dog (狸), which phonetically approximate Pali (Bari), a community of Taokas people. Miaoli city is the capital of the county, and is also known as "Mountain Town", owing to the number of mountains nearby, making it a great place for hiking.

As it's most popular though, for the dancing dragon races at last day of Chinese New Year Festival Celebration - Lantern Festival, I will devote to this event a separate post.

But for now, let me introduce a great place to eat, which must visit as you are there, and this place will not be listed anywhere in tourist directories. It's a kind of small, but interesting place, like a Cat Mouse Noodles in Changhua City.
Located in center of the town, it's not quite easy to spot it, but here is how it looks like from outside:




50 years in business, as they claim, the most they are famous are:

Noodles with pork, and Bao An - another traditional and widely popular food in western part of Taiwan.

Another, very taste in fact, it's a soup - are captured below. Ingredients are bamboo, port, vinegar, noodles and the brown one - it's  木耳  - mu er, or tree mushroom, sometimes called Jew's ear.

中山路　﹣　zhong shan road - here is what you need find, if you want to find this restaurant. Notice the yellow sign, the round one. This what you need. I did not wrote down the number of building, but if you carefully drive the zhong shan road, you won't miss it. They made it round, and it really stands out from all those typical to Taiwan street sign mess as you can see below. It's a view of Zhong Shan road, to both sides, standing in front to this restaurant.
 


 

Take a look also, how they prepare it: