Western Food Became My Comfort Food in Taiwan

My blood is Indonesian, but I was raised in Belgium on beer, waffles, chocolate, and fries. My stomach is French-Belgian through and through, and what once felt completely standard for me became, somewhere along the way, comfort food in Taiwan.

This is one of the more uncomfortable things I’ve had to admit about myself after years of living here.

If I told you I barely ate Asian food growing up, maybe two Indonesian dishes in my entire life before moving here, you’d probably think that sounds like a betrayal of my own DNA, or some kind of refusal to accept where I’m from.

But that’s not really what happened. I was six weeks old when I moved to Belgium, so bread and butter and potatoes instead of rice and Asian spices wasn’t a choice I made. It was just normal.

The trap of what’s familiar

Looking back, and honestly even now, my connection to Taiwanese food has stayed mostly on the surface. Even after years of living here, that’s on me.

I don’t mind change in general, but a full overhaul of something as ingrained as how I eat takes time. In my case, apparently a decade and counting.

The same thing happens with language. English becomes your comfort language in a country where you don’t speak Mandarin, because you reach for what you know. It’s when two parties who don’t speak each other native language, you aim for the middle (English).

And food works the same way. You start hunting for pieces of home inside a completely different culture and city, whether that’s a specific coffee order or a plate of pasta that tastes close enough to something familiar.

That’s the trap. I got too comfortable with it. What started as comfort food quietly overpowered any real curiosity about Taiwanese food. It’s not that I shy away when someone hands me something new to try.

I don’t. But I’ve never once ordered it myself, because my Mandarin is bad enough that pointing feels safer than speaking, which is its own story for another post.

And the trap compounds. One Western meal becomes two, two become ten, and before you notice it happening, you’re ordering Uber Eats out of habit or mapping out which parts of the city feel closest to home instead of actually being where you live.

Choosing to be guilty about it, out loud

I’ll say it plainly: I flock to Western food, and specifically Belgian food, more than I’m proud of. That’s the honest starting point for this post. Recognizing it was the easy part. Changing it is the part I’ve avoided.

Going into 2026, I’ve decided to stop pretending this pattern doesn’t exist and actually push against it.

Instead of treating Taiwanese food as background noise to my usual order, I want to treat it as the actual opportunity it’s always been, to force myself into dishes I don’t recognize, to ask the staff at a stall what they’d recommend, and to go with it instead of falling back on what’s safe.

The goal isn’t to swear off Belgian food forever. It’s to stop letting comfort make every decision for me.

If you’re a foreigner landing in Taiwan/Taichung

This is the part I most want other foreigners here, or arriving here, to hear:

Skip the Starbucks and find a Louisa Coffee instead. Skip hunting for “Belgian waffles” and go to a local waffle shop that’s doing its own thing with different flavors.

Go to a night market, point at something you don’t recognize, and buy it before your brain has time to talk you out of it.

More than anything, the mistake that kept pulling me back to comfort food was comparing everything new to what I already knew, instead of just letting it be its own thing. That comparison is the real trap, more than the food itself.

I’ll keep sharing this food journey here as it goes. And if you’re ever in Taichung, I’ll point you toward the spots I’ve actually come to trust.