Dashoushao Japanese BBQ

大手燒

No. 18, Wufu 3rd Rd, Qianjin Dist
高雄市前金區五福三路18號
(07)331-1521

Monday-Sunday 
5:00pm-2:00am

English friendly: yes
vegetarian friendly: no
average cost: 300-400NTD

I have had the good fortune(?) to eat at two separate Japanese BBQ places within the past three days, and now I get to tell you about them! Spoiler alert: the other one was better.

Dashoushao has the sort of location and interior design of which roaming hordes of frivolous Taiwanese food-bloggers love to fill whole blog posts, every detail photographed from a million different angles... It's cool, guys. They're going for a vintage Japanese feeling: low wooden tables and stools arranged in the open air, a wooden cart serving a selection of freshly stewed items, a refrigerator full of old-timey Japanese drinks, etc. etc. A very nice atmosphere, and you're going to pay for it.

When you're done with your meal, you just have to walk a few steps around the southeast corner of Central Park (this place is right on the edge of it) to get to the Brickyard "beer garden," famous rendezvous point of the legions of foreign English teachers and exchange students you somehow never see in the daylight.

This place also has a nice selection of beer and sake, however, for those prefer to get drunk sitting down instead of standing up.

The menu is divided into two main parts: 燒烤, or BBQ, and 關東煮, which I just learned translates into Japanese oden, which itself apparently translates into "[stuff] stewed in a light, soy-flavoured dashi broth." The waiter informed us upon sitting down that the BBQ takes 20+ minutes, and encouraged us to order some oden to stave off our hunger. The oden took like 10 minutes, and the BBQ more like 30 (all this after having to wait 20+ minutes just to get seats), so keep in mind: this place can get BUSY. Of course it doesn't help that we went at 7:00pm on a Saturday.

The oden is ordered directly from the adorable wooden cart mentioned earlier. Whether floating around in the cartsoup or delivered to one's table sliced into bite-sized pieces and accompanied by wasabi, all the oden options are of an eerily similar color, texture, and taste. Part of that is the horrendous orange lighting (also responsible for these horrendous pictures), but still. What we have above is two scallops (yummy!), some radish thing (radishy), a mushroom (a mushroom), and three other unidentifiable objects of different shapes that may as well have been carved from the same block of brothtaste. I think we got a tofu thing as well. I don't even remember.

The BBQ was a step up, but not a huge step. Here we have pork wrapped around mochi and sprinkled with ground peanuts. Sorry for the orange.

I would have thought the mochi + ground peanut combination could NEVER go wrong, but it certainly didn't go right... I am almost impressed that such a combination of dessert and meat managed to be neither sweet NOR salty. If I had to describe the flavor I guess I would say "chewy", except chewy isn't a flavor you guys.

This guy, though! Chicken wings, stuffed with 明太子, or mentaiko, or "the marinated roe of pollock, and cod [yummy!!!]"--who'd have thought? Foods-stuffed-in-other-foods innovations are one of my favorite things ever, and this time around it worked quite well. The chicken was tender and stuffed to bursting, the mentaiko all gritty and visceral and nom-nom-nom. Yeah.

Our meal concluded with some sort of meat (I think pork, I forget) covered in tons of cheese, which was whatever.

All this for two people qualifies as a light dinner, and we didn't even order drinks, but it still came out to like a million NTD. Even with the cool atmosphere and lack of bugs (how do they do it!), I dunno if it was worth it. The location is convenient though, and if you have a pack of friends that wants to split the bill + beers and wile away the nighttime hours beneath giant trees and aggressively orange lights, I could see it being a pretty fun time.

OVERALL RATING: 3/5