GF's grand-aunt gave her some money to help fund a get-together for the kids. Char-grilling meat around the hibachi is always a good time, and we had a good experience at Gyu-Kaku before, so we rounded up the usual suspects for a Sunday lunch at the location across from Sogo. The place was relatively sparsely populated for a weekend mealtime, unlike when we went to the XinYi location on a Saturday night. Once we got everyone together, it was time to light up the charcoal. The servers started bringin' the raw meat and we were off to the races.
The first round was all about the beef. The cow-tongue is a signature selection. The thinly sliced tongue had a slightly chewier texture without being tough, tasty either sprinkled with salt and dipped in fresh-squeezed lime juice, or pre-marinated and dipped in a heavier soy-mirin dipping sauce. For each order of meat, one can choose between just rock-salt, a soy-based marinade, or a miso-based marinade. Plain salt lets the flavor of the meat itself come through. The soy marinade gave it a more hearty flavor, and I found the miso marinade to be a bit too sweet for my taste. The sirloin was the best bang-for-the-buck, with a plateful of thick-cut meat which grilled up perfectly. Filet was tender, of course, but the cubes were barely large enough to not fall through the grill openings. The kalbi meat was tasty but a bit too fatty, although it may have helped if I'd the patience to let the grill render out all the fat.
One can't live by meat alone, and the restaurant offered some vegetable sides wrapped in foil packets which one can set on the side of the grill to steam in its own juices. Asparagus and bacon is a classic combo and the addition of shitake mushrooms worked well, too. A bit heavy-handed on the bacon which made the packet a bit salty but not overwhelmingly so. The shitake-enoki packet was dressed with butter and a bit of stock to give the mushrooms that creamy richness when the bundle of enoki is saturated with the juices. It's a trivial dish to do yourself at home, but it's still good eatin' even in a restaurant setting.
The savory meats would've gone great with a bowl of Japanese white rice if I had the stomach capacity. As it were, we ordered bimbimbap, which is the Korean-style stone-bowl rice which is plenty flavorful on its own. The rice pressed against the hot stone bowl forms a slightly charred crust which is broken up into crunchy bits when the rice is mixed with the fixings and the red-miso sauce. Not the best version ever, but then this isn't a Korean restaurant, and it was still plenty good. The kimchee-seafood hotpot was totally terrible, though. The seafood had the crap boiled out of it and the kimchee obliterated any potential seafood flavor but wasn't strong enough to actually assert itself in any interesting way.
Had some pork along with more beef in the second round. The fatty bacon-like cut wasn't really suited for the hot hibachi as the bubbling fat caused scary flareups. And by then we've all gone way past our daily allowance of char-grilled animal fat.
When we went to the XinYi location, the waiters had fancy PDA-things to record the order and they were attentive throughout the meal. No high-tech order-taking here. Maybe it was just because the room wasn't busy enough to rouse the waiters, but the servers at the Sogo location spent most of the time huddled in the back half of the dining area or in the kitchen when the patrons were sitting in the front room. They were tardy in clearing the emptied but bloody plates, and didn't bother refilling water, etc. without active summoning. They're not really paid well enough to care, but the lack of attention did annoy the GF and she let 'em have it when she filled out the diner-comment form. Maybe somebody will even read it before it gets disposed in the leftover hot coals.
牛角日式炭火燒肉 (頂好店)
台北市大安區仁愛路4段27巷34號
02-27514514
Other locations around Taipei