The awards trace Taiwan’s food culture through the dishes that people carry with them long after the meal ends.

Most diners are familiar with the Michelin Guide, or with global rankings like The World’s 50 Best Restaurants. In Taiwan, however, another food award begins not with professional chefs or judges, but with diners themselves.

Now in its fifth year, the 500 Dishes Awards takes a markedly different approach from most international dining guides. Instead of anonymous inspectors and standardized scoring systems, the project invites 50 judges from varied backgrounds to reflect on the dishes that stayed with them most over the course of a year.

Each judge signs their name, explains their choices, and recommends individual dishes. Judges are asked to set aside scorecards and the expectation that they perform as food professionals. What matters instead is how they live, eat, and move through Taiwan, and the dining memories they gather along the way.

Many of the judges are Taiwanese, while others are long-term residents who have built their lives and careers on the island. Coming from all walks of life, they are connected by a shared relationship with Taiwan’s food culture. Drawing on that collective experience has helped set the awards apart, while also sustaining ongoing discussion about what makes a dish in Taiwan both quintessential and worth remembering.

Ultimately, the judges are asked to look back on the past year and select 10 dishes they found hardest to forget. There are no boundaries around cuisine, price, or setting, as long as the dish leaves an impression.

Recognition is extended to individual dishes rather than to entire restaurants. A single eatery may appear multiple times for different creations, while dishes selected by several judges can receive multiple “plates,” reflecting their reach, appeal, and impact.

The awards did not emerge fully formed. Their current structure reflects a series of decisions shaped by timing, platform, and institutional constraint — factors that only become visible when traced back to the project’s beginnings.

Food project in the media

The 500 Dishes Awards were not conceived as a formal ranking, but as an offshoot of broader experimentation within the United Daily News Group (UDN Group), as traditional media organizations in Taiwan grappled with shifting readership and platform dynamics.

Noticing how social platforms was reshaping the way stories were produced and consumed, Vicky Chien, general manager of UDN Group, began rethinking how long-form editorial content might reconnect with younger audiences.

The initial response was 500 Times, a project focused on culture, food, and everyday aesthetics, aimed at readers attuned to lifestyle and creative expression. While the content found its intended audience, its reach remained limited. Over time, the project extended from an editorial label into a series of offline events, and 500 Dishes began to take shape.

In its earliest stage, the project had no rigid system. It was simply a way to connect people who cared about how food fit into daily life.

That changed in 2021, when the spread of Covid-19 on the island forced restaurants to shut down and pushed the food industry into a period of acute uncertainty. The moment led Chien and her team to consider whether the project could do more than document taste. Could it also, even indirectly, offer support and help preserve Taiwan’s culinary diversity?

International dining guides tend to emphasize technique. The Michelin Guide, for example, publishes clear evaluation criteria that weigh factors such as ingredient quality, cooking skill, consistency, and balance, and relies on professionally trained inspectors who remain anonymous. By contrast, the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, published by UK media company William Reed, is based on the votes of more than 1,000 industry professionals across 28 regions, operating under strict rules around experience and conflicts of interest.

The 500 Dishes Awards take a more enduring approach. Rather than asking how well a dish was executed, the project focuses on why it was remembered. Judges are encouraged to reflect on dishes that lingered, whether for their flavor or for the emotion, nostalgia, or moments attached to them through personal stories, a sense of familiarity, or experiences that resonated beyond the plate.

For Chef Max Wo, culinary director of Silks House at Regent Taipei hotel, this distinction is monumental. Under his leadership, multiple dishes from Silks House have been recognized by the 500 Dishes Awards over several consecutive years, often earning some of the highest plate counts on the list.

Wo’s standard is straightforward: “If you can’t remember what you ate the next day, it hasn’t really stayed with you,” he says.

Questions, criticism, and context

Given that the awards operate outside conventional frameworks, some criticism has naturally followed. One recurring point of debate centers on the makeup of the judging panel. With judges drawn from a wide range of industries rather than selected exclusively from the food world, online discussions have questioned their credibility, at times treating that perceived lack of professional authority as grounds to dismiss their selections outright.

Supporters counter that this is precisely what sets the list apart. If the aim were to mirror mainstream opinion or to scrutinize technical precision, the 500 would be just another voice in the chorus of online ratings. Instead, proponents say, the awards seek to capture something less easily measured. By tracing the foods people talk about in everyday life, the project draws a line between dishes diners might try once and those they could return to for a lifetime.

From this perspective, the list reads less like a final verdict than it does a living record. As each year’s selections are added, individual dining habits accumulate into something closer to a shared archive, designed to reveal patterns over time. For Chef Wo, that shift makes the awards more about observation: a way to see what people in Taiwan actually eat, return to, and carry with them.

Geography adds another layer to the discussion. Dishes from northern Taiwan appear more frequently on the list, reflecting in part the region’s higher population density and wider range of dining options.

Cultural context matters as well. In Taiwanese society, interpersonal relationships, often framed through the concept of renqing (人情), carry significant weight. Publicly recommending, or declining to recommend, a restaurant can be read not only as an expression of taste but as a relational act. Outside major urban centers, where social networks are tighter, that sensitivity can influence who feels comfortable participating under their own name.

When recognition becomes social responsibility

As the influence of the 500 Dishes Awards has grown, its effects have become more visible on the ground. UDN Group’s Chien says the moments that stay with her most rarely involve headline restaurants. Instead, they tend to come from small, often overlooked establishments.

“For well-known restaurants in Taipei, an award may simply be a nice addition,” she says. “But for small shops in rural areas, it can be what keeps them going.”

One of the earliest examples came from a modest restaurant in New Taipei City’s Tamsui District. Despite its semi-incognito status, dancers from the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre — Taiwan’s internationally renowned contemporary dance company — would often visit the eatery after rehearsals. When the owner received the award plate, she broke down in tears, repeating that she was “just running a small business” and had never imagined being recognized in such a way.

A more recent story unfolded in Taitung City. Chien tells of a dessert shop run by a young man who was preparing to close down when he learned that one of his desserts had been selected for 500 Sweet, the dessert-focused extension of the 500 awards.

The recognition prompted him to pause and reconsider, Chien says. The man began refining his ingredients and methods, and not long after, an unexpected order arrived from the local government, ultimately helping him keep the shop’s doors open. For outlets like this, the awards offer affirmation that the work is worth continuing.

Chef Wo says there are advantages to the fact that unlike international lists, the 500 Dishes Awards and their related projects shine a light on private kitchens and small, everyday establishments. For diners who turn to guides to decide where to eat, this unique selling point helps expand the landscape of what is considered worth seeking out.

A living portrait of Taiwan’s table

Asked to define Taiwanese cuisine, many find the question resists a single answer. It is a cuisine shaped over time by Indigenous traditions, waves of migration, colonial histories, and constant adaptation. Even the most unassuming snack can carry traces of earlier eras, reworked through local practice and everyday life.

This layered complexity is what gives Taiwan’s food culture its distinctive character. Different communities, generations, and life experiences have shaped how food is prepared, enjoyed, and remembered. The table, in this sense, is never static, but continually rewritten by the people who gather around it.

Fittingly, the logic behind the 500 Dishes Awards is, at heart, editorial. As Chien puts it, “editing is a form of curation.” The 500 Dishes Awards do not claim to define Taiwanese cuisine. Instead, they document what people choose to return to, year after year, under their own names. In doing so, they leave behind not a verdict, but a record of how Taiwan eats, values, and remembers itself in the present moment.

About 500 Dishes Award (bilingual, English content is available, with further updates in progress.)