吃飯了嗎？

台北君悅大飯店 - 凱菲屋

We had an expiring gift certificate for the Grand Hyatt, our one final perk for holding our wedding at the hotel. But NT3500 doesn't quite cover a whole banquet, but it seemed gauche to leave the infant at home with mom to run out for a nice meal with just ourselves. I searched through their restaurant web pages and noticed that the Cafe buffet restaurant just happened to be offering a Lady's Night discount that day. With all of the wife's sister and cousins, it wasn't hard to round up the perfect crowd to take advantage of the opportunity. And mom was okay with babysitting since she's always supportive of a good deal.

I like to start my buffet attack with a plate of cold items. They had a nice variety of greens, pastas, and seafoods for their salad platters. There were also areas serving dim-sum and other Asian foods, but even a high-end hotel can't do much for food that sits in steamers and under heat-lamps for a whole evening. The fresh juice-bar is a touch of class, though, to set it apart compared to the usual all-you-can-eat pig-troughs out on the street. Not to mention the impeccable interior decoration as befits the best hotel in Taipei.

But really, it's all about the fresh greens for me. There was a separate DIY-Caesar area with romaine leaves, croutons, bacon bits, parmesan shreds, and dressing which you can toss into a big mixing bowl to mix up your own salad.

Maybe it was because we visited relatively late on a mid-week evening, but the food quality seemed a notch down from my expectations. The roast was just a little bit tough, the seafood wasn't as extensive. Although the dessert area was pure chocolate heaven, with mousses, cakes, puddings, and a fountain. With our gift certificate and the discount it turned out to be a fair value. So I guess it's true about 一分錢一分貨.

Cafe
凱菲屋
台北市信義區松壽路2號
02-2720-1234

Eindhoven Markt Cafes

Arrived in Eindhoven about mid-morning and set down our luggage. Had just enough time to get some lunch before our meeting in the afternoon. But after a twelve-hour flight to an unfamiliar city in a distant country, even lunch seemed like quite the looming challenge.

Thankfully we were situated in the middle of town, and like most European cities, the central square is lined with cafes and restaurants. They were just starting to set out the tables and open up the umbrellas for lunch service. Coming from Asia the air was a touch chilly, but not too bad under the sunlight, so we chose a cafe at random and sat outside.

I must've been way too tired for my own good, as I made the worst mistake a visitor can make in a European restaurant: ordering a soda. Two fucking Euros for the tiniest glass of Diet Coke with three tinier ice cubes in it. Should've just got a cappuccino like Max did. It cost the same for a hand-made drink plus they give you a butter cookie to go with it.

Not surprisingly in Holland, the menu was heavy on bread, cheese, and ham. A brunch-y meal was perfect for us confronting jet lag, so it worked out nicely. I had the Chef's Toastie with sauteed onions, mushrooms, and peppers on top of a ham&cheese sandwich. Max goes like a Euro-version of a Grand-Slam-Breakfast with three eggs on ham, cheese, and tomato with toast

After an afternoon of tough meetings, we were even less inclined to seek out fancy restaurants. So we returned to the central square, choosing a different cafe this time. Of course, I manage to pick the one which didn't have an English menu, so we were left to sound out the Dutch words and hope they resembled some familiar English homophone. A couple glasses of cold Franziskaner beer and a plate of tasty bitterballen tided us over. Bitterball is crispy fried breading on the outside, creamy savory meat sauce on the inside, with a dish of mayo for dipping on the side. The perfect Dutch bar snack, which was about the only bit of foodie-research I had time for on this work trip.

The beef steak and stuffed salmon turned out to be safe, albeit unremarkable, entrees. Barely good enough to get stuffed and head back to the hotel for some sleep before jetting off to the customer's factory in Romania the next day.

潮品集

At five weeks it's time to show him the outside world a bit. A quick jaunt around the NTU campus in the late afternoon and then take the wife's mother and aunt out to dinner to thank them for helping with the wife and baby during the 月子 recuperation period. The baby's in his stroller, so we needed a roomy, clean restaurant. A hotel restaurant seemed like the best way go. San Want Hotel is on the way home, and we've been to its signature Cantonese restaurant a few times before with good experiences, a good safe choice.

The restaurant offers private banquet rooms to the side for large family gatherings, as well as a main room for smaller parties. The decor is nicely modern-Asian, in please dark reds and blacks, with halogen spots for bright lighting at the table without flooding the space with excess light. They offer a menu of full dishes, as well as a small but well-chosen set of dim-sum ordered a-la-carte. They were also offering a special lobster-prixe-fixe menu that night. For the four of us, two of the set meals supplemented by some classic dim-sum favorites was the perfect amount of food for a nice but casual dinner.

They were nice enough to let us use a spare banquet room for a quick pre-game diaper change for the kid. He fell asleep in the stroller once we set the bed flat and pulled the shade down, allowing us to have a peaceful meal without disrupting other people, a big relief.

The set-meal offered some non-conventional dishes like salad with Japanese sesame dressing and lamb chops. The lobster butter-sauce spaghetti is my go-to dish when I have to host overseas visitors at our China factory. But here wife and I took both shares since the obasans don't like the strong cream flavor.

The dim-sum items like 蘿蔔糕, 腸粉, and 蝦餃 could be found at any dim-sum place, but they do the basics as well as any place we've tried in Taiwan. Most importantly, the food was served quickly enough so we could finish our meal just as the baby woke up and started crying for mommy. It's good to know that it'll still be possible for us to have a nice meal out once in a while, even with newborn in tow.

潮品集
神旺大飯店
台北市忠孝東路四段172號
02-2772-2687