Month: April 2009

Gen Tei Shoku

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Last night we ended up trying out a fairly local Japanese place after a terrible experience on Friday night in a really awful Japanese place that I don’t know the name of. Gen Tei Shoku is a semi chain-restaurant (six locations in Taipei, two further south), but we were pleasantly surprised.

I ordered some kind of beef with spring onion (大蔥牛肉燒) and peppers in a small skillet and it came with rice, soup, a small salad and two kind of pickles. Brenda ordered some deep fried chicken with peppers in a light sweet and sour type sauce (a limited time special) and she got the same side dishes. We also got in a side ordered of deep fried prawns which was an extra NT$30 each. The food was very flavourful and tasty and not overly expensive for what you got. As this is a Japanese place, you also get free hot green tea.

Their sushi and sashimi also looked very fresh and nice and they serve it in big pots filled with ice that look really cool. We’ll definitely be back here again, although it’s not a super cheap place, so it’s more of a weekend eatery than an everyday place. They do lunch boxes for NT$150-250 which seems very expensive.

You can find their menu here

Imbiss

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I got excited when I heard there was a new German restaurant in town with modern influences from Turkey and Greece. We headed over one night in the week to check the place out and sadly it didn’t live up to my expectations, at all.

I’ve been craving Turkish pizza for a while and with that on the menu, this place was a give. However, the fact that the menu I’d found online read beef mince and pepperoni had set off some warning bells, but they weren’t loud enough. The place looked quite cheap when we got there and there were hardly any customers. The orange decor leaves a bit to be desired, but then again, it’s meant to be an affordable place and the decor isn’t the most important thing.

Brenda ordered the Pork knuckle sauerkraut bun and I got the Turkish pizza of course. They offer either a set menu or just the item itself, although you get free hot coffee, hot/cold tea or lemon water with any order. Brenda’s order came first and it was like a small loaf of bread stuffed with loads of sauerkraut and some small bits of grey pork meat. It was really greasy and the best thing was the dip that came with it which was something akin to tzatsiki, but with a strange tartar sauce hint and a slight spiciness. Would’ve been nice with fish, but not this.

So what about the Turkish pizza then? Well, forget about the menu, it’s all lies. Sure, it was folded up to look something like a Turkish pizza, but the crust was rock hard and the filling, well… For starters I found one speck of beef mince in it and there was no pepperoni in it at all. Instead it was loaded with bacon, peppers, onion, tomato, olives and cheese. None of these ingredients would go into a Turkish pizza apart from the tomato, but it would be used for the sauce, not put on as slices. It also looked like they’d never cleaned their pizza oven, as there were loads of grey stuff on the bottom of the pizza which wasn’t very appetizing.

Sure, it was cheap, the Pork knuckle sauerkraut bun was only NT$130 and the so called Turkish pizza another NT$159, but it was also a very disappointing meal. We’re not going back, but hopefully other things on their menu is better. You can find their website here 

Update: This place appears to have closed as well, not a big surprise to be honest.

Evan's burger

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Despite the American influence, Evan’s is a Taiwanese outfit through and through. This doesn’t make it a bad place to eat as such, although don’t expect everything on the menu to be what you think it is.

The menu consists of a wide range of appetizers (we didn’t try any of them), salads, sandwiches, burgers (of course), fajitas, hot dogs and “steaks”. There’s also a breakfast/brunch menu.

I ordered a chili beef burger and Brenda ordered a tornado beef burger which comes with onion rings. The good news is that all the burgers come with fries and a drink. Considering that most seem to cost between NT$220-250, this is quite reasonable. The jumbo and super jumbo burgers are of course more.

The not so good part was the buns, as they were the typically sweet kind of bread you get in Taiwan and even Brenda complained about it and she normally likes sweet bread. As my chili burger had enough jalapenos on it, I didn’t really notice it after a couple of bites. Vegetables come on the side and consisted of some pickles, a couple of tomato slices and some lettuce. The onion rings were also awful, they tasted very greasy and like they’d been sitting since the day before and they weren’t crispy at all. The fries were pretty decent, somewhat similar to the stuff you get in Burger King.

At under NT$500 for the two of us, Evan’s is cheap and cheerful if not great. My only concern was that of what I saw in the kitchen, where a guy had a big pot full of chicken on the floor and loading them into a tray. The floor was anything but clean and who knows what the rest of the kitchen was like. I didn’t see him drop any chicken on the floor, but I’m not keen on the way they interacted with the food in the kitchen. I don’t think we’ll be back in a hurry and there are a lot of choice when it comes to burger places in Taipei now.

Could someone please just get some normal burger buns in? I really don’t care for all the strange burger buns that’s been showing up as of lately…

You can find Evan’s burgers website here and I’ve added a map marker on the FindIT map. It’s near ShiDa road.