吃飯了嗎？

Yuma Southwestern Grill

Modern Taipei is metropolitan enough to offer some interesting, if not always authentic, takes on foreign cuisines. However, Mexican food, or more accurately Cal-Mex and Tex-Mex Americanized Mexican food, has been the big gap. To be honest I haven't even been brave enough to even try the local places, having seen such horrific reviews on the net. It's kinda surprising since you figure there's enough Americanized kids returning from Cali who've had their share of tacos and burritos to support a business. Instead, it's a sad state of affairs when Chili's is about the best one can hope for.

But hope sprang anew when I heard about Yuma Southwestern Grill, the new venture by the founder of Alleycats Pizza. Thankfully it's not too far from home so I was able to convince the heavily pregnant wife to waddle down Zhongxiao with me. The alley has quite the cluster of Western restaurants, with Alleycats, Toasteria, and Mary's Hamburger all right there besides Yuma.

The interior was spacious with high ceilings and widely spaced tables but the warm southwestern colors and decor gave it warmth. There's also more space downstairs and outside with long tables & benches for big crowds, regular tables and chairs for couples, and a bar for singles. The menu is definitely concentrated on the namesake grill, with ribs chickens, and prawns in various sauces all cooked by the coal grill. The appetizers looked good, too.

The menu description for the Nachos Nevada: "Tortilla chips, Monterey Jack cheese, fajita style bell peppers and onions, jalapeños topped with romaine lettuce, tomato salsa, sour cream, and fresh cilantro." All served in a sizzling hot iron skillet. Oh my god that sure sounded good. It's been so long since I've had a good plate of nachos. It came piled high with all the good stuff listed above, kept warm by the hot&heavy iron skillet, and it's big enough to be an entree for two, or shared as an appetizer amongst a whole table.

With the big appetizer, we decided that one entree to share between the two of us was enough. Chose the half-chicken with the peri-peri sauce, which was a flavor I haven't seen around here before. Even the half-chicken was plenty for the two of us to share. Marinated with the tangy-spicy peri-peri sauce, with additional peri-peri and also a cilantro cream dipping sauces on the side. The meat was juicy and tender, even the breast meat. Got the "combo" with Spanish rice and corn on the side, but the rice was only okay and the corn was a sad joke, but at least the chicken was legit. And we still had some nachos left to work on. Belgian beer with Mexican food? Sure, why not, as the big 500ml glass of refreshing Hoegaarden was good company to the spicy food.

Left enough room to share a dessert. Might as well as go as Mexican as possible so we chose the vanilla-lime flan. The Mexican pudding is a bit harder than the typical milk pudding, and the lime juice and zest added a bit of extra tang and flavor. But I wasn't really blown away by it.

Wished our stomachs were bigger or we had a larger group to check out more of the menu. A local-run place certainly offers more foodie-cred than Chili's. They have some nice-looking biz-lunch deals, too. Too bad I'm not around to take advantage of them. Might be a good choice next time we need a place to arrange a big group dinner with wife's sister & cousins.

Yuma Southwestern Grill
台北市忠孝東路四段216巷11弄21號
Lane 216, Alley 11, #21 ZhongXiao East Road Section 4
02-87738895

鍋飽飽

The mother-in-law's place in Sindian is very much typical Taipei suburbia, full of high-rise apartment complexes filled with young families. With all the working couples, casual inexpensive family restaurants spring up like weeds to accommodate their dining needs. And what they need is more cowbell more shabu-shabu, as there are about 38,701,081 hot-pot places within walking distance. This one happens to be right downstairs, which is convenient for the wife in her very pregnant condition, and hot pot seemed liked a good choice on a cold night.

This particular location had recently shed its affiliation with the 白甘蔗刷刷鍋 chain to go its own way, and they were offering special discounts to build up a new clientele. Along the way it changed from the typical all-you-can-eat to a combo meal approach where you order the meat you want and it comes with a bowl of veggies and all-you-can-eat sides. For us it's not a big difference since it's more than enough food for us either way, even with the wife eating for two. She had the lighter kanbu broth while I was brave and went with the ma-la hot broth. The ma-la was certainly hot enough to kept me chugging away at the soda, but it's lacking the spicy complexity of a real ma-la hot pot broth, so I ended up doing a lot of shabu-ing in the wife's pot instead. It's not really unsanitary since the broths are kept in a boil the whole time, at least that was my justification. If you're still hungry, there's plenty of free noodles to cook in the flavorful broth to top off the meal. The generic ice cream was icy and artificial-tasting, unlike the classier places which offer Häagen Dazs or Mövenpick. But the veggies were fresh enough and the meats were a bit thicker-cut than the typical paper-thin slices at the all-you-can-eat places. Considering the cut-rate price, I was willing to accept some cut corners in the peripherals so long as they maintain the quality of their core competencies.

鍋飽飽
台北縣新店市民權路5-1號
02-29108851

山東餃子館

The unassuming, generically named restaurant is tucked away within an Sindian alleyway. But the place is always packed with patrons here for the big platefuls of dumplings and steaming cauldrons of sour cabbage pork hot-pot, both northern China specialties brought to Taiwan by KMT's veterans. The 獅子頭 lion's head meatballs is the wife's favorite. Big pork meatballs the size of a fist slow-roasted in a clay pot with broth to infuse flavors and tenderize with napa cabbage. The hot-pot is stuffed with plenty of the sour cabbage and fatty pork to build the soup base, then filled to the brim with meatballs, etc. The prawns and clams also add flavor to the soup, but the strong flavor of the soup base and the long boiling time aren't suited to seafood, I think. It would've been nice if they offered more meats which we could cook in the hot-pot shabu-shabu-style. They were generous with the pork, but with my cholesterol count I really shouldn't be eating so much pork fat. Perfect for a wintry evening, though.

山東餃子館
台北縣新店市中央路133巷19號
(Near MRT Xiaobitan Station)
02-22193541

越粉舖

Rushed to the ChungHwa Telecom office after work to pick up my spiff new iPhone. But by the time I finished the sign-up process and got the phone activated, it was too late to go to grandma's for dinner. So I went to the Eslite XinYi's basement food court for dinner, and to play with the iPhone's many functions. Set off in its own nook in the Eslite Xinyi basement, Phõ is nominally a slight step up from the standard food court offering. It offers the signature Vietnamese soup noodles with different meats, as well as fried rices and other standards like shrimp spring rolls. The broth wasn't as clear as it could've been and they were a bit skimpy with the dressings like basil and bean sprouts. Frankly, it was straight up mediocre, and less than that when you take into account the cost. On the other hand, the iPhone camera takes surprisingly decent pictures for a two-megapixel sensor with no auto-focus and no flash.

越粉舖
誠品信義店B2
台北市信義區松高路11號B2樓
02-87893388