Every block of the city has a lunch box restaurant, and every one of them sells the same food. Rice, some vegetables, and your choice of meat. The meat choices are always the same; pork chop, chicken leg, chicken breast, and fish fillet.
Depending on the place the meat will either be pan fried, or deep fried. Both unhealthy, but you can choose to get the one that is not deep fried and feel a bit better about yourself. That is except for the chicken breast. You can only get the chicken breasts deep fried.
This is probably because fried chicken breast is an iconic thing in Taiwan. The actual chicken breast is a bit different than what you may be used to. It is very long and flat, as if somebody took a hammer to a chicken breast to flatten it out. Making it so each bite is almost like a sandwich, where the top is fried skin, the middle is meat, and the bottom is fried skin.
Yes it can be tasty but super unhealthy. The problem for me is that i really like breast meat. I remember when I was little kid, I would only eat dark meat because I thought since it's called "dark" than it must be better, while white meat must be boring. I'm still not sure if I was a six year old racist, or just purely basing it on the blandness of the color white. Either way when I grew up, i started to prefer white meat. Again I'm not sure if it's because I'm not a racist, or because of my fondness for breasts.
Getting back on track. This need for every restaurant to deep fry the chicken breasts means two things. 1. I will die of a heart attack. 2. I get burned fingers from trying to pull the skin off of the fried chicken. I try to quit, but it's too hard. I even tried to become an ass man (yes Taiwan sells chicken butts which actually is pretty tasty). But it's just not the same. I have to accept who I am, a (chicken) breast man.
The picture is of one rather unique chicken breast. You'd think that since there are so many lunch box restaurants selling the same thing, that their cooking style would all have something different, but for the most part every restaurant is exactly the same. The special thing that this place does is they open up the chicken breast, put some butter inside, sew up the chicken, and cook it, letting the butter melt inside as it cooks.
Needless to say this is a bit too much, even for me. So I only went here to take the picture for all of you. I hope you will be helping with my hospital bill after my heart attack.
