Mitsui Japanese Restaurant Taipei Review

by Liv | Apr 24, 2011

Mitsui Japanese Restaurant Taipei Review. Whenever I visit Taipei one of the restaurants I have to visit is Mitsui. I really love Japanese food, it’s beautiful and can be incredibly tasty, and Mitsui is one of the finest examples, if not the finest, in Taipei.Mitsui is also, by UK standards, incredible for value for money but there’s more on this below.

Whenever I visit Taipei one of the restaurants I have to visit is Mitsui. I really love Japanese food, it’s beautiful and can be incredibly tasty, and Mitsui is one of the finest examples, if not the finest, in Taipei.Mitsui is also, by UK standards, incredible for value for money but there’s more on this below.

THE RESTAURANT

Very smart and very modern. The service is impeccable. All of the staff are extremely knowledgeable and extremely attentive. They regularly top up your drinks and if you wait literally more than two or three minutes between dishes they apologise. If you also order a set menu the restaurant manager will personally take your order.

THE FOOD

The first time that Chris and I travelled to Taipei together was in January 2009. We both ordered a set meal which consisted of the following:

Large scallop on a seafood sesame base covered in crispy seaweed
Spot Prawn and tuna belly sashimi
Foie Gras dish
King Crab dish (they brought a whole live King Crab to our table for our approval)
A Lobster salad
Kobe Beef Hot Pot (for information Kobe Beef is the Japanese beef that comes from Wagyu Cattle that are fed corn, massaged and given beer to drink). This might sound crazy but Kobe Beef is absolutely divine.
Endless supply of Chinese tea
Green tea ice cream and fresh seasonal fruit

How much? £50 each!!! In the UK this would have been £200-300 or more.

Deep Fried Scallop with seaweed

Spot Prawn and tuna belly sashimi

Lobster Salad and the dressing was amazing!

Kobe Beef Hot Pot

Green Tea Ice cream and seasonal fresh fruit

The second time around we ate differently. We ordered a set meal and three sushi platters.

Sashimi platter. Highlights of this were a huge prawn and super fatty tuna (the fattest most expensive part of tuna)
2 sushi platters. This contained one piece of half cooked fish, roe sushi (roe is super tasty), salmon sushi and my favourite was the sea urchin sushi. Sea urchin looks and sounds disgusting but it’s absolutely divine. Another highlight was the squid sushi. Just two days before going to Mitsui we went to the food hall in the 101 building and had sushi there. The sushi is granted cheaper (cheaper than Yo Sushi and much better) but the squid sushi I had was a bit tough. The squid sushi in Mitsui just melted in your mouth. There were of course other kinds of sushi but naming these is fairly irrelevant.
Abalone Salad (abalone is a large sea snail)
Grilled King crab legs
Tilefish with drops of sea urchin (this is the first time I tried Tilefish and it’s gorgeous)
This wasn’t Kobe beef but it was absolutely delicious and I love the presentation
Miso Soup
Deep Fried softshell crab. Chris is petrified of anything with more than 4 legs (strange I know!) but these small softshell crabs are delicious (Even he thinks so too! ). You eat absolutely everything and both the shell and the meat inside are some of the tastiest crab I’ve had.
Green tea ice cream
Endless supply of Chinese tea (I believe this was Oolong which I really enjoy).

Mitsui Sashimi Plater

Mitsui Sushi plater

Mitsui Abalone Salad

Grilled King Crab Legs

Tile Fish with drops of sea urchin

Deep Fried Soft Shell Crab with Pumpkin puree

Mitsui Barbeque Beef

Total cost: About £30 each. Phenomenal! We originally planned to eat just sushi but after looking at the menu and based on past experience we had to order a set meal as well. Let’s also face it, we don’t go to Taipei very often.

A note about pricing. The sushi alone would have been £40-50 in the UK but the quality of the sushi in Mitsui was on a whole different level. I will admit I have had better sushi in Japan itself but then you expect the best sushi to be in Japan.

Each time we’ve been to Mitsui we’ve been utterly filled up and every dish was incredible. One thing I must point out was paying for the meal. If we eat in a regular night market or shop then we pay with cash but for a larger more expensive meal we always pay by card. Mitsui wouldn’t accept either mine or Chris’ credit cards as they hadn’t opened a line for international banking. I had to run down the street to a cash point, half scared that neither of us had any money in our accounts, then had to run back and pay. This wasn’t great.

Dirty Dirty Duck Ubud Bali Restaurant Review

by Liv | Apr 20, 2011

When we travel to new countries we like to do some research on restaurants and as we were going to Bali we did some research. We found there are many western style restaurants but we really like to try to find as authentic as possible local food. We had read about a restaurant called Bebek Bengil, also known as Dirty Dirty Duck.

Bali is quite famous for it’s crispy duck and on reading through websites like Tripadvisor we gave this restaurant a shot.

Dirty Dirty Duck is located right next to the Monkey Forest in central Ubud. Ubud itself is a town with around 30000 people living there but it’s immensely popular with tourists due to the sights but also the great shops where you can find all kinds of things at various prices (definitely haggle the prices down).

The dishes we ordered were:

Bebek Bengil Crispy Duck
Nasi Goreng Special (Balinese fried rice)
Chicken Satays
Duck Fried Rice
Duck with Balinese Chili Sauce

ABOUT THE DISHES

Bebek Bengil Crispy Duck

This is really tasty! The skin is crispy and the duck itself is juicy and really delicious. The duck’s are however quite small so keep this in mind when ordering.

Bebek Bengil crisp duck

Nasi Goreng Special

I really fell in love with Nasi Goreng while I was in Bali. I really like fried rice in general but Nasi Goreng is quite different from Chinese/Taiwanese fried rice. Some of the differences include [INSERT TEXT]…

Chicken Satays

I never really got on with the satays in Bali. They had a really strange peanut taste but were covered in a brown sauce which I didn’t really like. Chris normally loves satays but even he didn’t like them.

Balinese Chicken Satay

Duck Fried Rice

This duck fried rice is made by the duck meat from the duck. I think they even use the duck fat to fried the rice. So the rice is full of the fragrance from the duck fat.

Duck with Balinese Chili Sauce

The chili sauce in this dish is truly amazing. It’s easily one of the tastiest chili sauce’s I have ever eaten. I loved it so much I even ate a big bowl of rice just so I could eat more of this chili sauce. Truly phenomenal.

Duck in Balinese Chili Sauce

THE RESTAURANT

We arrived quite late in the evening so we didn’t take any shots of the restaurant itself but the following link will give you an idea of what it looks like: http://www.agungraka.com/bebekbengil/. Bebek Bengil / Dirty Dirty Duck is placed right at the entrance of the Monkey Forest on a road called Monkey Forest Road. Surrounding the restaurant is a rice plantation that really adds to the character of the restaurant. Generally speaking the restaurant was clean and the service was pretty good by Bali standards.

Dirty Duck Restaurant Bali

WOULD WE GO AGAIN?

Definitely. It’s a shame we went quite late at night as we would have loved to have taken some more photos and also Chris had pretty bad heatstroke at the time so he didn’t eat much. But of what we tried we really liked and the restaurants surroundings are amazing. Prices also seemed fairly reasonable. I seem to remember we paid about 400,000 IRP for everything (about £30).

NOTE ABOUT BALI

Bali was surprisingly expensive. Neither Chris nor I organised the trip to Bali but based on my experiences of travelling around Thailand I expected Bali to cost about the same. It doesn’t! Eating out in Bali costs more than equivalent food in China, Taiwan and Thailand and the prices aren’t that dissimilar to the UK. I’ve no doubt locals eat a lot cheaper than this but Bali itself, once you go outside of your resort/hotel is really dirty so it’s up to you if you want to trust local street food. In Taiwan I have no problem with this but in a foreign country which I don’t know and where I don’t speak the language I edge towards being more careful and pay a little bit more money.

Stir Fried Rice Cake with Spring Greens and Pork recipe

by Liv | Apr 13, 2011

Stir Fried Rice Cake with Spring Greens and Pork recipe

Stir Fried Rice Cake with Spring Greens and Pork recipe. Hello everyone, I’m home! So two days ago we returned from our holiday and we’re still suffering from jet leg (not helped by both of us shooting a full day’s wedding the day after we returned) but also suffering from not being able to eat the food we’ve been eating in Taipei and to an extent Bali.

Before going on holiday I was starting to struggle for ideas about what to cook but going home and eating both my grandma’s food but also visiting a number of restaurants that I used to go to has rejuvinated me. I’ll be writing up some restaurant reviews for various restaurants that we visited in the very near future and these restaurants had everything from authentic Chinese and Taiwanese food to the most fabulous Japanese fine dining.

So this dish is called Stir Fried Rice Cake with Spring Greens and Pork (long title I know!). Rice cake is known as Nian Gao in Chinese. Nian Gao has been part of Chinese cuisine for more than 3000 years and there are many different kinds of Nian Gao. Nian Gao can be eaten sweet or savoury. This recipe was influenced by Nian Gao from Ningbo.

The first time I ate this dish was in one of my elementary school classmate’s home. Her grandparents came from Ningbo and they would cook this dish for me. Immediately after eating it for the first time I fell in love with this dish.

Credit: All photos were taken by Chris at: http://www.chrisradleyphotography.com

Stir Fried Rice Cake with Spring Greens and Pork recipe

Course Main Dish

Prep Time 30 minutes

Total Time 30 minutes

Servings 4 people

Ingredients

150 g shredded pork
200