Where should I eat in Taroko region, and which local food or drink is worth trying?

Plan around the region's geography: inside the gorge, dining is a handful of stops, while the region's kitchens are 30 minutes down the road in Xincheng and Hualien City. Up at Tianxiang, the road-end village has small eateries and a convenience store, and the valley's Truku-run restaurants serve the indigenous table: zhutong fan, sticky rice steamed inside a section of bamboo and cracked open at the table; grilled mountain pork; wild greens gathered from the hillsides; and soups seasoned with maqaw, the mountain pepper whose lemony bite is the Truku kitchen's signature. The Taroko Village Hotel's indigenous buffet is the gorge's most complete version of the meal. At the park gate, Xincheng township's eateries add the coast — this is a fishing port's food, and the day's catch is the menu.

Hualien City is one of Taiwan's great snack towns. Its famous dish is the bianshi — a wonton of minced pork in an almost translucent skin, served in a light broth with celery and white pepper — and its two historic houses, Daiji and Yexiang, have wonton loyalists divided like sports fans; a bowl costs the equivalent of a couple of dollars and the shops run from morning to night. Queue also at Gong Zheng Bao Zi for steamed buns and soup dumplings at canteen prices. Then the sweet Hualien is proudest of: mochi. The county's rice country produces Taiwan's most celebrated handmade mochi — soft glutinous cakes rolled fresh in peanut, sesame or red-bean — and the old shops (Zengji and its rivals) sell them still warm; the Amis people's version, made by pounding, appears at markets and festivals under the name dulong.

Dinner is Dongdamen. The East Gate market, opened in 2015 on the city's seafront edge, gathers about 400 stalls across themed streets — a Futing street of classic Taiwanese snacks (oyster omelets, stinky tofu, sausages grilled over charcoal), a street of mainland provincial dishes, and the one that matters most here: the Aboriginal street, where Amis and Truku vendors serve bamboo rice, roasted wild boar, millet wine and wild-vegetable dishes under stage lights, with indigenous music on the market's plaza stage most evenings. It runs roughly 5:30 p.m. to 11:30 p.m., and it is the single best place on the east coast to taste the region in one sitting.

On Dongdamen's Aboriginal street the bamboo tubes come off the grill split and steaming, boar fat pops over charcoal, and a cook in a Truku vest hands you a first taste of maqaw on the tip of a spoon — pepper, lemon and pine forest in one small green bead.

Hualien's "bomb" scallion pancake is its own small tradition — a whole egg wrapped inside a fried scallion pancake that is sealed and puffed so it lands blistered and round (the two famous stalls sit on Fuxing Road, and each has its queue of believers). It is the breakfast-or-anytime snack that pairs with a gorge day: buy two on the way out of the city in the morning.

• Lunch — Inside the gorge at Tianxiang or at the gate in Xincheng, built around bamboo rice and whatever the mountain greens are that day.
• Afternoon — Hualien's snack circuit on the way back: a bianshi bowl at one house, mochi warm from the counter, a bomb scallion pancake for the road.
• Dinner — Dongdamen from six o'clock, grazing the Aboriginal street first and the snack streets after, with the plaza stage as the digestif.

The gorge's own restaurants keep park hours and can close with the road — the convoy schedule that governs sightseeing governs lunch, so carry snacks and water in the car rather than trusting a Tianxiang table at a fixed hour. Dongdamen thins dramatically on rainy nights and Mondays. And the wonton and pancake masters close when they sell out, which on holiday weekends can mean mid-afternoon; front-load the famous names early in the day.

Sleep and eat in Hualien City, treat the gorge as a day's expedition with a packed breakfast, and put Dongdamen on the night you are hungriest.