Taipei #5 - Wednesday

I had a lunch seminar at the conference center today, so I ended up with an American-style box lunch (sandwich, salad, bottle of water). Yawn.

Dinner was somewhat more interesting. Some colleagues from a Taiwanese equipment manufacturer offered to take us to dinner, and they chose a place called FiFi’s, which is a haute cuisine modern Shanghainese and Szechwan restaurant. I deferred to our hosts to order foods that they enjoyed, and so we got to try a wide variety of things as dish after dish was presented. Notable among the different choices was a dish the host said was called “fly’s eye” which was diced meat (pork, probably) along with very finely diced green onions and what I think were fresh (not dried) peppercorns. Another appetizer featured fried shrimp diced up with onion and served inside of a lettuce leaf. Also there was sliced hot beef, which was a Szechwan dish served in an oil-based sauce that I thought was actually soup at first. It was very tender and quite spicy due to the red peppers that were cooked with the dish. We had ma pao tofu, which is soft tofu that has been fried crispy on the outside. As per normal, tofu doesn’t taste like much, but this was pretty good – shows that you can make anything better by deep frying it! Our hosts also made sure to order a specialty of the house, dong po pork, which is braised pork belly. This restaurant served it along with some flour buns so that you could make yourself a small sandwich. Pork belly is pretty fatty, but it was absolutely melt-in-your-mouth tender, and the braise made it very flavorful. Plenty of Taiwan beer to wash it all down, and I learned a toast in Mandarin - Gan bei ("dry the cup"). Dessert was some fried noodles dusted in powdered sugar that tasted a lot like a slightly less puffy and crunchier funnel cake, and a Chinese pancake with chocolate syrup on it.