Person at work forwarded an electronic coupon to everyone, forwarded to the GF and she thought the place looked interesting. Met up at the ZhongShan MRT station and took a cab over to the Nanjing Rd. location. Don't get to this area very often because it's not on an MRT line, but it's actually a lively mix of offices buildings, apartments, and many restaurants catering to them.
This is another chain of popular-upscale places by the same conglomerate as 陶板屋. The schtick for this restaurant is the fancy Hokkaido kanbu they use for their hot pot soup base. 聚 has the orange-brown color scheme compared to the purple-jade at 陶板屋, but the black ceiling with halogen spot lighting both acted to create contrast and atmosphere. Bead curtains and fabric hangings split up the surprisingly large basement room into more intimate sections. Good thing the GF made the reservation ahead of time as the place filled up quickly with people coming off work and families out for a communal meal around the hotpot.
It's a set-meal system with an appetizer-meat-starch-dessert combo for each person, with choices for each. Got the half-and-half soup base with the hotpot partitioned like an ying-yang symbol with one side of the plain kanbu soup base and the other side with the spicy soup (i.e. plain soup with pepper oils and spices added). The waiter recommended a sip of the soup to taste the original flavor, and it was tasty enough. More importantly it seemed to be reasonably free of MSG. The induction cooktop heats up fast and keeps the table tidy and easy to clean. Had time to enjoy the appetizers while the soup came to a boil. It was a dish of three bite-sized items, a soft-boiled 滷蛋, tuna salad sitting on a crisp leaf of romaine core, and an ume-flavored cabbage wrap. We both agreed the egg was the best thing, since we're used to hard-boiled soya eggs with the dried up yolk, so it was interesting to dig into the still-runny yolk, and the soft-boil meant that it's not as salty as the typical 滷蛋. GF likes the 梅子 flavor, I don't particularly. Tuna salad was okay, more like a clever way for them to use up the romaine core after the big leaves are thrown into the hotpot.
I chose the Fish Head main, and couldn't get the music of the Dr. Demento classic out of my head the whole night. The fish head parts is thrown in the soup to cook through and in the meantime we could dig in with the Choice Beef. The beef were nicely marbled and thinly sliced, draped on top of some outer cabbage leaves to make the mound of meat look much taller than it actually was, but it was plenty of food as it was. The meat barely took a few seconds to cook in the bubbling broth which left it perfectly tender. It worked well either soaking up the spicy broth, or cooked in the plain broth and dipped in the supplied ponzu-soy sauce. The acidity of the ponzu provides a refreshing tang to all the rich food.Left the fish cooking a bit too long so the meat was a bit dried out, but there were still plenty of cartilaginous fish-head goodness to suck down and chew on. Each main plate also came with a basket of different mushrooms and veggies and various side-bits like handmade wontons. In case that's not enough food they also provide a rice/noodle side-dish. GF went with the recommended hand-squeezed fish noodle, where they give you two tubes of ground up fish and binders which you can squeeze into the boiling broth to make noodle-like things. It wasn't as exciting or as tasty as it seemed on the menu. The plain udon combined with the cooking broth would've made a better choice, plus the GF likes udon anyway. The Golden Congee was a bit more interesting, as the server came by with some rice, poured some clear broth from our pot in, then set the burner on high to make the raw rice into congee in a few minutes while reciting some script about how it's a typical Hokkaido way to serve guests, etc. He finished off the congee with a dash of egg yolk to give it the golden color, and scattered some scallion and nori for crunch and color. Fun and good-looking, but we were both to full to really enjoy it at that point. Would've loved to have another bowl of the broth with all the meaty goodness cooked into it, but was too stuffed.
But there's always room for dessert. GF had the better choice with the red-bean ice, which came in a huge frozen pyramid, with a side of condensed milk for additional creaminess. The iciness was a refresher after the hotpot hotness, and not too sweet. I had the Macha Dessert combo which featured a taro mochi and a custard sweetened by molasses and a strange tasting soy-ish powder (kinako perhaps?), accompanied by a big steaming mug of strong neon-green macha. The bitter tea was a good way to finish off dinner, too.
Not the cheapest hotpot in Taipei, but one can concede the corp. their fair share of profit. After all atmosphere and service don't come for free. The good service was more due the corporate indoctrination of the minimum wage drones rather than any genuine customer care, but I'll take fake good service over genuine bad attitude any day.
聚北海道昆布鍋(台北南京店)
台北市中山區南京東路2段72號1樓
02-25716500