Taipei #2 - Sunday

Today I went back to Taipei 101 food court for lunch, and if it’s possible, it was even busier. Everywhere had a line, and watching for a table was worse than finding a parking space at Costco on a Saturday. I got a great big bowl of noodles with vegetables, pork, and kimchi in broth plus some tea for about $5, and then carried it around for about 15 minutes looking for a table before I gave up and ended up finding an unused bit of counter space at the corner of one of the food stalls and ate standing there. For someone with fairly poor fine motor skills, I’m getting surprisingly good at picking up noodles with chopsticks (at least in order to get them to my mouth in order to slurp them up). The food was again quite tasty – I guess if you’re not a fan of Kimchi it might not be your thing, but I pretty much never met fermented cabbage that I didn’t like, and the Kimchi added a nice sour and spicy component to the broth that was really good.

In what is rapidly becoming a theme (hey, it’s close, there are lots of options, it’s cheap, and the food is good), we went back to Taipei 101 for dinner. While most of the places are just little stalls where you order your food and then find a table in the common seating areas, there are a couple of actual sit-down restaurants. We had a group of 10, so we actually got reservations for a private room at a place called Din Tai Fung, which specializes in dumplings, buns, and other steamed items. They are apparently one-star Michelin rated, and it was definitely worth it. We ordered all sorts of different dumplings with different combinations of meat and vegetables in them, as well as several varieties of Xaio Long Bao, which are a special kind of dumpling that contains a solid filling as well as a bit of broth, and is then steamed. You take the dumpling out of the bamboo steamer tray, dip it in the sauce, which is a mixture of Chinese black vinegar, soy sauce, and julienned ginger, and then place it in your spoon (one of those wide, flat spoons you always get in the Asian restaurants). You use your chopsticks to pierce the dumpling to release the broth and steam (so that you don’t burn the heck out of your mouth), and then eat. Gooooood stuff. Worth noting that they have a US franchise now too. We had a couple of soups, including a very good hot and sour soup and a shrimp wonton soup. There were also dessert dumplings, one filled with red bean paste (sweetened) and another filled with Taro.

I also had my first sampling of the local beer, aptly named “Taiwan Beer” which makes up the majority of the market here. It’s a fairly standard pilsner, but as one of my colleagues noted, it is a bit more full-bodied than most of the other well-known Asian pilsners, almost like a less-hoppy Heineken. The interesting thing about this meal was the price. The way that they work it is that a private room comes with a base price. That is, we can have the room, but we are going to be charged a minimum of NT$10,000. However, the cost of the room itself drops the more food and drink we order, so if we spend $10,000 or more on dinner, the room is free (or put another way, we pay for the room, and up to $10,000 worth of food & drink is free). What this means is that for a party of 10, enough food to thoroughly stuff us all was about $34(US) apiece.  I’ve eaten at plenty of places where the food wasn’t as good and the entrée alone cost more than that.