New Taipei City - 厚道飲食店 YingGe Honest Restaurant

YingGe (鶯歌) is a small town in New Taipei City. YingGe is famous for Taiwanese Pottery and especially teapots. If, like me, you became infatuated with oolong Tea (烏龍茶), then this is definitely a place to consider if you're looking for a new teapot. However, be aware that a lot of the shops sell fake teapots from China. You have to sift through these and try and find one created in YingGe itself, don't just settle for a cheap knock-off. In addition to this, you can actually make your own teapot, plates, spoons etc at a variety of different shops along the streets. So it's a pretty fun day out. The cobbled streets and various street stalls are fun to walk around and the whole place, even though there are a fair amount of tourists, still feels quite quiet.

However, what YingGe doesn't have, is good restaurants. We walked around this small market-like town and saw a lot of people queuing up for this place.

As you can see, it's rather busy. So, we went up to the worker at the front, said table for two (liang3wei1 兩位). She gave us a ticket and whilst we waited we could have a little walk around the other streets in the area. The wait was maybe around 30mins. When we got inside, the walls of the restaurant are filled with memorabilia from all over the world.

Onto the food... We got a set, so for one person you can get a salad (Sha1La1 沙拉) and a main dish, or a soup and a main dish. Here is the salad, it was actually quite good. It had some nice fresh pea shoots, thin slices of apple, shredded purple cabbage, thin slices of pepper, and a nice vinegar dressing. Everything tasted fresh, and from what I've found in Taiwan's lack of salad dishes, it was good value for a set. 

For the main dish, we both went for pork chop and rice (pai2gu3fan4 排骨飯). The portion size was rather large, so make sure you go in hungry! The flavour of the dish was very good, and it didn't feel too unhealthy, either. Often with the pork chop and rice dishes (somewhat of a specialty in Taiwan) they are deep fried and really greasy. This dish wasn't greasy. The pork chop was fried, but not deep fried. The meat inside remained nice and juicy, managing to not dry out in the cooking process. 

The pork chop sat on top of bamboo shoots, carrot, pickled cabbage and plenty of rice. There was no sauce, however, the meat was so moist that it didn't particularly matter. 

So, we had a set of salad and main meal. Here, we have the other set: soup and main meal. The soup was a bamboo shoot soup (sun3tang1 筍湯). This is one of my favourite soups. As long as the bamboo shoots are fresh, this soup is a winner. The broth takes on the subtle flavour of the bamboo shoots and with some extra scallions on top, this soup is just fresh and clean. It isn't greasy in any way, like a lot of soups can be. I would highly recommend this kind of soup. 

We also ordered a drink, however, this didn't come in the set. The drink was quite special, it was a honey aloe drink (蜂蜜蘆薈低骨露). The flavour was quite unique: The honey made it sweet, yet the aloe made it quite fragrant and flowery. There were also chunks of aloe jelly inside the drink which you could suck up in the wide straw and eat them. For an extra $10NT, i'd say it's worth trying it out.

新北市鶯歌區育英街85號

Number 85, YuYing Street, YingGe, New Taipei City

Happy Eating!

New Taipei City - 小伍牛肉麵 YongHe Beef Noodles!

YongHe (永和) is one of the most densely populated places not only in Taiwan, but in the world. There are a plethora of alley ways, streets and winding roads. It is VERY easy to get lost. But if you do, then get in a taxi and get to this Beef Noodle shop. It will be worth the $70 taxi trip, I assure you.

Around a 15-20min walk away from DingXi station, located on FuHe road 福和路 near the intersection with ZhuLin road 竹林路 (福和竹林路口) sits this little gem, just waiting to be explored. I've been here a few times, now, and each time there has been a steady flow of customers both eating in and taking out. There are no queues, so for those of you who are not quite fully convinced of the lining up nature of eating at a good restaurant here, then this place is worth a shot.

For me, Beef Noodles are not something I often eat. Why? Because, when they are done right, they are just too good. But, when they are done wrong, its a crying shame. There is nothing I miss more about England than those Sunday lunches: a perfect time for the family to get together, have some drinks and have a big roast dinner (we are talking roast potatoes, carrots, peas, brocolli, beef, horseradish sauce..). I digress. So, therefore, I only ever eat beef noodle soup upon recommendation of somewhere particularly special, otherwise I may just leave feeling rather upset and homesick.

This menu is very user friendly and it offers up some pictures, for a better idea of what you might get upon ordering. The three different columns are for the type of noodles you would like. Reading from left to right you have: LaMian (la1mian4 拉麵) which are the more thick noodles, XiMian (xi4mian4 細麵) which are the thin noodles, and finally you have the soup option with no noodles (tang1pin3 湯品). I have to say, that for a beef noodle shop, this place is probably about the average price. However, I would say that value for money is very good and certainly worth of the $200+/- price tag. 

Of course, side dishes are a must. The small plates in restaurants are often priced at $25-$30 and Taiwanese people will often get one to accompany their main meal. This is often a good chance to get your portion of vegetables in. However, we decided to go for the spicy tofu and small fish small plate, which we just picked out from a selection of plates. With any bowl of beef noodles that I will eat, there needs to be a copious amount of pickled Chinese cabbage with it. Often, the beef noodle shops will have a pot on each table, but here we just took it from next to the small plate section. 

We ordered the Beef Roll (niu2rou4juan3bing3 牛肉捲餅). I will often order this in such a restaurant, as I feel like if it is done well, then it is a good indicator as to whether the restaurant will be good or bad. Its a simple creation, using a scallion pancake, wrapped around a filling of thing slices of beef, scallions and also often a tangy beef paste. It is delicious, especially when paired with that chilli sauce you can see in the above picture.

I ordered the Spicy Beef noodles with beef stomach and tendon (ma2la4niu2san1bao3 麻辣牛三寶) with the thick noodles (拉麵). MaLa 麻辣 is a type of cuisine originating from the Szechuan Province of China. It loosely translates as 'spicy and numb' which gives you an idea of how spicy it is going to be. However, a good 麻辣 dish will often have a good level of spice running through it, and the shock to your lips and tongue shouldn't be an ongoing sensation. The spice in this dish was beautiful and it was wonderfully balanced, allowing you to still taste the beef broth. The tendon was cooked to a silky smooth consistency and it was lovely and rich in it's taste. If this is something you haven't tasted before, then I would recommend giving it a try. It has a subtle taste, with just a little bite in the middle but soft around the outside. The beef itself, within the deliciously spicy broth, was of ample quantity and also very nice quality. There was a good amount of fat running throughout the beef allowing it to remain succulent but also enough meat to really impart that beef flavour into the broth. 

We both ordered the same dish, because it just sounded so good! So, unfortunately, there are no more pictures of the other dishes. However, this dish is good enough, alone, to be the reason why you should be coming here! 

The opening times are between 11am-9pm every day except Thursday.

新北市,永和區,福和路212號

Number 212, FuHe road, YongHe District, New Taipei City.

Happy Eating!