BBG’s Taiwan Journal: Day 1b (Lunch pictures!)

Baby Bro's Girlfriend had some more time to write some more about her trip to Taiwan.  Now we are finally arriving at the food pictures, so I'm excited.  Enjoy!

Day 1b: Jhubei
Lunch + School

Monday,
December 21, 2009
12:00
PM

For lunch on my
first day, my mom and I headed across the street to a semi-new restaurant that
opened up across the street from our condo.
 

Here are pictures
of the front and back of their business card and the store front and interior :

 

You can see their
kitchen in the third picture of the store, which I thought was pretty cool.
Everything they do is visible, if you went over there and watched — preparing
your dishes and peeling and making stuff. This is a really nice clean and
modern place for a small restaurant on the street. If you go to a random small
restaurant in an alley, you'll often only find cheap tables and stools.
 

As for what to do
when you enter one of these restaurants, you find your own seating, and if you
can't find any, tough luck. You would basically wait until someone left and
they cleaned up the table, or you could decide to get it take out. After you
find a seat (or not), they usually bring over the menu for you to fill out and
order. If they don't bring over a menu, you get up and get your own from the
"kitchen" counter.
 

I didn't realize
until I scanned it, but the back of the business card actually includes the
menu! Definitely a good business decision. Nonetheless, I still took pictures
of their menu/ordering sheets. 

The pinkish one is for dine-in ordering and the white one with the
characters ?? in the top right corner is for
take-out. These ordering menus are common for Taiwanese restaurants. The
headings of the table are dish name, price, number of dishes, total. Down the
left side of the table are the different categories of their dishes: noodles [??], dumplings [??], soups [?], and rice [?] and appetizers [??]. In this instance, my mom filled out an order for ma-jiang dry
noodles [????] and boiled greens [???] for both dine-in and takeout. The takeout order was
for us to take to my brother at school for lunch.
 

In the corner,
they also had a little stand where you could get some more appetizers on your
own, not on the menu. 

 

Not exactly sure
how it worked since I didn't really notice my mom getting stuff from it – I was
busy trying to take nice pictures – but my mom told me that you just select
however much you want on a plate, take it up the counter, and they would weigh
it and cook it for you (if it needed to be cooked).
 

What I also found
fascinating was that they dedicated a whole wall describing what I guess are
their most popular dishes.
 

 

The four listed on
the wall are

1. 
   Soy-braised beef noodle soup [?????]
2. Vinegar sauce
   dry noodles [????]
3. Hand-made
   dumplings with scallions [??????]
4. 
   Special
   soy-sauce [????]

 
All the food took
maybe 5 minutes to come out — we didn't have to wait long.
 
This is the plate
of boiled greens.

 

 

They added a
little bit of meat sauce to it to give it a savory taste. The greens were very
crunchy with the right amount of saltiness from the sauce.
 

This is the
appetizer medley of tofu, seaweed, and I believe intestines with a bit of soy
sauce and green onions sprinkled on top. 

 

Since I don't eat
intestines, I left all that to my mom and picked out the tofu and seaweed to
eat. Once again, the sauce was not overpowering, and the taste of everything
that I ate was pretty good. Nothing that spectacular and special.
 

Here is the bowl
of ma-jiang dry noodles that my mom and I shared after it was slightly mixed.
She doesn't eat that much, so she just took a small bowl of mine. And I say
slightly mixed because my mom stirred it before I could tell her I wanted to
take a picture.
 

 

Ma-jiang is a term
for a type of warm sesame-based sauce. However, this restaurant made it
different by adding some ground pork on the side in addition to also having
some boiled greens (same as appetizer) and sliced cucumbers. Even sharing a
bowl with my mom, the extra stuff definitely made this bowl very filling. I
could barely finish all the appetizers plus the noodles. As for the noodles
themselves, they were delicious! They tasted like they were hand-made, since
they were very "Q," or chewy. Hand-made noodles add so many points to
the satisfaction counter.
 

To pay for the
bill, my mom went up to the "kitchen" counter with the ordering form
they left on the table after they delivered the food. My mom had also brought a
lunch box and containers to put the food in for my brother, and she told them
to put our takeout food into those containers. I don't think I've ever seen
anything like that happen here in California, so I thought that was really nice
of them. I think they were a bit confused at first when my mom asked though.
 

Side note: Unlike
the US, you do not leave tips on the table after you finish. Usually they just
tack on a service charge on your receipt, if any. Much better than this US
tipping way where you have to decide how much to leave and hope you didn't
offend your waiter too much if you don't leave that much. However, service in
general in Taiwan is pretty excellent, even in cheap restaurants. I don't think
I've ever seen a lazy waiter. 

After we finished
eating, it was about 12:20pm and time for us to take my lunch to my brother. He
goes to a bilingual international school in Hsinchu only about 15 minutes away
from our condo. Here are a couple pictures of the building his class is in – or
actually, the whole bilingual section of the school.
 


 

There's another
section of the school for just the Chinese-speaking students. And I say that
this is the bilingual part of the school, because literally, from I believe
elementary to high school, all their classrooms are in that building. Students
in Taiwan actually stay in one classroom, and the teachers are the ones that go
in and out. I guess that's definitely a more efficient way to teach because the
students don't have to rush in and out to get to classes. My brother's
classroom was on the top floor – the floor for high school, grades 10-12 in
Taiwan, not 9-12. If I recall correctly, there's only 2 classes of about 20
students for each grade in the high school. With these small class sizes, I
guess you can call this a kind of private school, since my brother had to take
a test to get in, but I believe that this is still government funded. If anyone
is interested, I believe the school website is here.
Oh cool, I also found a Wikipedia
article on Google! Fascinating… If any of the above info conflicts with
Wikipedia, believe Wikipedia.
 

To be continued…

Giovanni’s

Giovanni’s Italian Restaurant & Pizza
6133 Balboa Ave
San Diego, CA 92111
(858) 278-9191

Giovanni’s is one of those restaurants that I’ve seen around, but didn’t really think much about trying it.  Last week, it was part of a groupon deal, so I thought it would be a good time to check it out.  There are two locations: one on Clairemont Mesa Blvd. and one on Balboa Ave.  The two locations have different menus, which can be found on their website.  I ended up choosing the Balboa location because I liked the menu.

We went on a Saturday night, and it wasn’t too crowded.  The atmosphere was very casual and laid back.  Our server was really friendly, and had a great memory.  She took all our orders without writing anything down (we had a group of 7), and didn’t mess up at all.

Our meals were served with complimentary garlic bread.  The bread slices were nice and thick.  But there wasn’t that much garlic flavor.

I had a real craving for pizza after be inundated with pizza commercials on tv lately from Pizza Hut’s $10 any pizza, and Domino’s new pizza formula.  So while normally I’m drawn to pasta dishes, I opted for a pizza.

I chose the Giovanni’s special: bacon, ham and beef.

I found the pizza to be too oily and the crust too thin.  I like thin NY crust pizza, but this thin crust was more like frozen pizza type crust.  I wasn’t impressed.

Little Sis had the Cannelloni, which contains chunks of chicken.  She didn’t really like it.  I took a bite and thought it was pretty bland.

Baby Bro’s Girlfriend chose the meat ravioli.

Boyfriend ordered the Penne Salsiccia & Ricotta.  They were out of penne noodles, so he got spaghetti ones.  This was my favorite dish of the night.  There were tons of sausage and tomatoes.

Little Bro ordered the combination of lasagna and ravioli.  He said it was just okay.

Baby Bro ordered the spaghetti with red clam sauce.  While the dish was heaping with clams, Baby Bro complained that it lacked flavor.

All in all, it was a pretty mediocre experience.  The service was good, but we probably won’t be back.  Also, I thought their entrees were a bit pricey for such a casual joint. The pasta dishes averaged about $15.

Chinese Egg Tarts

I used to make chinese egg tarts a long time ago, with varying degrees of success.  The type of egg tarts I like are hard to find (solid pie/tart type crust), and a recipe similar to the ones I like are even harder to come by.  When I bought these cute Norpro Tartlet Tins, I just knew that I would be making some fancy shaped egg tarts with them.

I ended up using a recipe I found on allrecipes.  I like how the crust was similar to a tart crust (hard rather than layered and flaky).  Based on my previous egg tart experiences as well as many user reviews, I did some rather large adjustments to the recipe.

My recipe was just enough to make 36 shells, and I had just enough filling as well.  I really loved how these turned out. They take a bit of time to make though because you have to shape the dough into all the little tart molds.  My brothers weren't as impressed because they like the flaky crust.  But Boyfriend and I really enjoyed these.

I'll definitely make this recipe again, though I might tweak it a bit more if I find some other good recipes.

Chinese egg tarts

Print Recipe

Ingredients

Crust:

• 1 cup confectioners' sugar
• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 cup butter
• 1 egg, beaten
• 1 dash vanilla extract

Filling:

• 1/3 cup white sugar
• 3/4 cups water
• 5 eggs, beaten
• 1 dash vanilla extract
• 1/2 cup evaporated milk