Jacob offered to take us out for lunch as an early celebration for space’s birthday and to toast my trip to Taiwan
Jacob was in a celebratory mood and he began ticking off all kinds of boxes on the menu. I didn’t realize what was in store until the food started arriving at the table; plate after plate was placed on the giant lazy susan, it struggled under the weight. The fact that four of us had ordered so much did not go unnoticed, we had attracted the attention of the patrons at the nearby tables who were suddenly more interested in our food than they were in theirs.
The rundown:
Seaweed salad – Standard stuff, but the addition of cilantro made this the best I had ever had.
Hundred year old eggs – Not really a hundred years old but treated/aged/fermented (I don’t know) in a way that makes them look really old. With a translucent brown “white” that looked like solidified gravy and a dark green gooey yolk, it certainly looked disgusting, but it tasted fantastic. Think soft boiled egg, only eggier.
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| Nice yolk! |
Deep fried pig colon – Hey, I had eaten and enjoyed chicken asses so why not pig colon? Any meat this thin is going to end up super crispy when you deep fry it. No surprises here. Didn’t really taste of anything, but the texture was great.
Pork Belly (Dong Po Ro) – Wow! No wonder the national treasure is a stone carved like the stuff. This piece of meat blew my mind and had me convinced that anyone who doesn’t eat pork should seek counsel. To deny yourself this type of food indulgence is criminal. You cut it with a spoon and it melts in your mouth; the flavour is intense. When there’s nothing left you pour the juice into your bowl and drink it. When there’s no juice left, you drink your tears which are not nearly as tasty but provide ample evidence of how good it was and how sad you are that it’s gone.
Dumplings – Jacob ordered 3 different types: pork, crab and shrimp. Nothing I hadn’t tried before, which is not to say that weren’t good, great in fact, but just more of the same.
Noodle dishes x 2 – One of them was a vegetable dish that had “preserved beef”…go figure. Iris ate it and she’s a vegetarian so something may have been lost in translation. The other was spring onion even though fall was coming. Both were good but the pork belly was making the balance of an otherwise fantastic meal seem anti-climactic.
Oil Cake – Basically fried dough that was, as the name suggests, very oily…and very delicious. I dipped it into the various sauces at the table but secretly wished that more pork juice would magically appear at the table… I closed my eyes and twitched my nose…no luck.
At the end of the meal our table looked like a war zone, which in culinary terms should always be viewed as a success. I only needed one more thing, a medic.
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