Taitung Slow Food Festival Returns October 24–25, Bringing Nighttime Food Memories to Life

Taitung Slow Food Festival Returns October 24–25, Bringing Nighttime Food Memories to Life

The 2026 Autumn Taitung Slow Food Festival, themed “The Nighttime Table,” will take place on October 24–25, 2026, from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. at Xinsheng Plaza in Taitung City. Centered on Taitung’s nighttime food memories, the festival brings together local cooks, farmers, and food businesses to create event-exclusive dishes featuring seasonal ingredients, Indigenous flavors, and local culinary traditions. Five programs—Food Market, Food Talks, Music and Performances, Tableware Workshops, and Guided Tours—invite visitors to explore Taitung’s nighttime food culture through tasting, listening, music, hands-on activities, and walks around the venue. Taitung County Magistrate Yao Ching-ling said, “Since its founding in 2017, the Taitung Slow Food Festival has upheld Slow Food’s core principles of ‘good, clean and fair.’ This autumn, we are taking the foods people eat at night as our starting point to revisit nighttime food memories across generations in Taitung. Street food enjoyed after a film, a warm meal after work, and food shared around a fire in Indigenous communities have all inspired the participating cooks. Event-exclusive dishes will include hearty seafood noodles, creative Bunun-style stuffed flatbreads with bean fillings, stir-fried snails inspired by Indigenous community cooking, smoked-meat ‘Mumu rice,’ and Taiwanese-style savory rice porridge. Through these dishes, visitors can discover how Taitung’s local ingredients, food culture, and memories of everyday life continue to be passed down.” At the Food Market, participating vendors will draw on nighttime food memories to create exclusive dishes combining Taitung’s seasonal ingredients, Indigenous flavors, and family recipes. Food Talks will explore local stories and urban change through food, revealing how everyday meals preserve the history of life in a city. Music and Performances will enrich the evening program and convey the rhythms of Taitung after dark. The Tableware Workshops will focus on natural materials and environmental sustainability, offering hands-on opportunities to explore the connection between tableware and the land. Guided Tours, led by the Taitung Slow Food Association, will take visitors around the festival to meet the people behind the dishes, learn where ingredients come from, and understand the environmental values that inform their work. Each dish offers a starting point for discovering Taitung’s local produce and food culture. The Taitung County Government hopes that “The Nighttime Table” will bring local food memories to contemporary tables and help more people discover Taitung through an everyday meal. Admission is free on both days. No disposable tableware will be provided anywhere at the venue, and visitors are encouraged to bring their own. Join us at Xinsheng Plaza on an autumn evening to savor the late-night flavors shaped by Taitung’s land and way of life.