Tag Archives: Taiwan

Food

Rice Bowl Cafe – Best Taiwanese Food in Austin

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My parents are both from Taiwan. I grew up listening to post WWII stories from the mother country – you know the ones about working hard on the farm, walking barefoot to school, and barely having enough to eat. That last point is very important – because they didn’t have much food when they were children, my parents appreciate food and view it much more fondly than your average Joe. I have a feeling that most people in Taiwan have a reverence for food in the same way my parents do.

So where can you find authentic Taiwanese food in Austin where they care about food quality as much as they do “back home”? My favorite Taiwanese place in Austin is Rice Bowl Cafe, where you can get a little taste of the “motherland” here in the Live Music Capital of the World.

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Food, Reviews, Travel

Fooding Overseas – Taiwan Live Fish Restaurant

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Shiyuan Taiwanese Live Fish Restaurant

“Waste not, want not” the old saying goes – and the next Fooding adventure definitely does just that.

As you probably know, most people outside of America are not squeamish about the fact that meat was once a live animal. In Asia, they take it to the extreme. There, the ultimate sign of seafood freshness is being able to go to a restaurant and point at living meat (future meal) swimming around in a tank and then 10 minutes later, have that formerly living meat show up at your table cooked in 5 delicious ways, head, skin, and bones still attached – almost every part of the fish utilized in some way. This is the story of my Taiwan Live Fish Fooding adventure.

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Food, Travel

Din Tai Fung Dumpling House

If you ever find yourself in Taipei, wondering to yourself… “What should I do for dinner tonight?”, well I have the answer for you. Din Tai Fung. Din Tai Fung is a first and foremost a dumpling house, but these are not your typical Sunday morning Chinatown Dim Sum type of dumpling, these are pure ecstasy for the taste buds.

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Their signature dish is the pork dumpling with soup. I’m certain there is a more elegant name for them, but that was the translation the group of friends that I was with gave to me. These dumplings were exactly as described, a dumpling filled with tasty ground pork and soup. So naturally my first question was, how do they get the soup in there? After some speculation about needles and secret magic, no one knew the answer. Thus, I made my way down to the kitchen area to watch the 20 or so employees frantically making the dumplings(this is a very popular place). I watched them closely as they assembled the dumpling first the wrapper, add a bit of meat, then a glob of something that resembled jelly, only it was brown. Then it hit me, they were using congealed broth! Brilliant. They would place a small amount of the congealed broth, then seal the wrapper. During the steaming process, the broth would melt and become tongue searing hot soup.

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