Fragrant Seafood Congee

香味海產粥

No. 9, Qixian 1st Rd, Xinxing Dist
高雄市新興區七賢一路9號
(07)225-5302

Monday-Sunday
4:00pm-12:00am

English friendly: no
vegetarian friendly: yes
average cost: 100-150NTD

The full name of this place is 香味海產粥脆皮臭豆腐, not so much a name as it is a general description of what they sell: fragrant (well, it's alright) seafood congee and crispy-skinned stinky tofu.

I've been here twice now, and it was packed both times. It's not a super elegant setting or anything, as you can see in the picture. Still, when the food tastes good, who cares that you're perched on a little pink plastic stool? I've been to a few restaurants in my day and the ones with the best interior design are almost always the worst.

Their menu is short and sweet, all the better for me! Their famous stinky tofu is at the top left, and below it you'll selection of seafoods that you can pair with congee, noodles (麵線), or soup. "Congee", for those who don't know, is-- gruel. It's gruel. I got their famous fragrant seafood congee last time, so it doesn't feature in this report. Still, so you know, everyone who's told me about its fame almost immediately backtracked with: "Well, it's famous because the portions of seafood are very generous." I guess I'll say pretty much the same thing. It was good, for gruel, especially because the oysters, squid, shrimp, etc. floating in it were particularily... profuse. 

This time around I got the Neritic Squid (小卷, why there are like a thousand different names for squid in Taiwan I don't know) in soup with noodles (麵線). It came to the table looking SUSPICIOUSLY PINK. This may be the least appetizing color possibly ever.

Aha, that's a little better. So 麵線 are noodles in the technical sense, but probably the cheapest variety of noodles there is. They tasted like watery flour. Watery flour with a good texture, but watery flour nonetheless. The soup... tasted like watery saltwater. The squid was good (and generous! as you can see), but weirdly hard in a few places. I have no idea why. I do not think I want to know.

That's a pile of criticisms but I actually thought this dish was pretty alright. Still, if you're coming here for the first time you might as well get the gruel. Because it's famous. Right?

And here, the other resident culinary superstar! Their stinky tofu did NOT stink, not at all from what I can tell (though maybe I've become immune to it), but it was still really good. The skin was super crispy, the inside super spongy and full of delicious tofu juices. The pickled cabbage was a-OK, and just look at all those scallions! Their menu said it also came with basil, and while I believe I spot one solitary leaf up there by the carrots, it didn't feature in the flavor whatsoever. A shame! Still, this stinky tofu is Good Stuff.

I like this place, I do. I mean, I've been here twice, and I never go anywhere twice. I think it's mostly because I like stinky tofu so much, and they do a good job of making it. Other places do too. But if you're in the neighborhood, I don't see why you shouldn't stop by.

OVERALL RATING: 3/5

Grandma Pasta House

達文郡義大利麵食店

No. 31, Minquan St, Xinxing Dist
高雄市新興區民權街31號
(07)226-9636

Monday-Sunday
11:30am-1:30pm
5:30pm-8:30pm

English friendly: yes
vegetarian friendly: yes
average cost: 200-300NTD

I'm a little reluctant to review this restaurant, because it means admitting that I was wrong... Good Italian food does exist in Kaohsiung. It does. It really, really does.

You'll have to work to get it though. Grandma Pasta House is open for very short periods of time each day, and you'll probably need a reservation to secure seats. We went at 7:00pm on a Monday without a reservation, and lucked out, but you're still advised to plan ahead.

It's quite a cozy little place. The inside is all decorated with actual art from actual Western countries, and that night's music playlist was in very good taste. Even though there were lots of other people eating that night, the ambience enveloped me like a happy Western cloud.

Rumor has it the owner of this restaurant is a Taiwanese person who spent time in Italy. I believe it, based on the menu alone. It's not one of those Taiwanese Italian monstrosities with a thousand nearly identical choices of topping and sauce for you to mix-and-match with the pasta of your choice. All the dishes have been carefully thought out, and are prepared from scratch. They even have specials that change with the day/season.

I only took a picture of part of the menu, but rest assured the rest of it is just as alluring. It's not too big, either--but you'll still have trouble deciding.

For an extra 80NTD you get bread/salad and a soup. (And for an extra 120NTD they'll throw in one of their appetizers as well!) The bread comes topped with "shrimp paste" and looks a little suspect but was actually really, really good. It was actual Western bread: crispy, airy, yeasty, and no slightly sweet aftertaste. 

The soup of the day was neither corn soup NOR pumpkin soup!!! An actual different kind of soup! Indeed it was cauliflower soup, and it was delicious. Creamy and satisfying, but not too rich.

The pitcher's worth of free drink, which you can see in the upper right corner there, was also delicious! I think it was some sort of iced tea with honey or something. Either way it was completely addictive and I had like four cups. If you do the same, you can get a second pitcher for the low low price of 10NTD!

Here we have fettuccini in tomato sauce, with sirloin steak and vegetables. Take a look at that sauce and you can tell it was prepared fresh, not poured out of a can. I thought the noodles in themselves were not super spectacular, but they had at least been cooked well. Meanwhile the sauce was amazing, and the beef possibly even more amazing.

After an arduous decision making process, I decided on the spaghetti in pesto sauce with shrimp and hot peppers. You can see the peppers in front there, but I couldn't taste them. Not one bit! I'm sort of used to that by now though.

It took me so long to decide in part because the waitress kept telling me that my selections "didn't have any sauce" and Was I Okay With That. I persisted in the end, and got this. I guess Taiwanese people don't consider the above to be sauce. Well whatever it was, it was GREAT. It absolutely made the dish: cheesy, salty, pesto-y... perfect. The noodles were ever so slightly undercooked, and the shrimp were not the most awesome shrimp I've ever had (though they came deshelled which was nice), but whatever I don't even care. This meal made me. So happy.

An extra 80NTD also gets you an after-dinner drink, so I chose lemon and pomelo tea. In retrospect it was a pretty odd choice on my part, since I don't usually like either of those fruits... But it was great! The pomelo came in sweet marmalade form at the bottom of the cup, balancing out the sour from the lemon. I finished it all, even though I'd already had like seven cups of free iced tea.

In conclusion, I am overjoyed to admit that this restaurant SHATTERED my expectations. I can't wait to take everyone I know here, and show them how real Italian food is supposed to taste.

OVERALL RATING: 5/5

Katsu Victory

Katsu勝

No. 6, Senlin 1st Rd, Xinxing Dist
高雄市新興區林森一路6號
(07)261-7999

Monday, Wednesday-Sunday
11:00am-2:00pm
5:00pm-9:00pm

English friendly: no
vegetarian friendly: no
average cost: 150-200NTD

Apparently the servers at this Japanese lunch place are forced to shout words in Japanese whenever anyone opens the door. It's so sweet. The poor things don't even get tips.

This place serves Japanese rice bowls (丼), curry, and ramen, except they are no longer serving ramen. But no worries: you are only here for the side dishes. Specifically, the tofu side dish. It will make its appearance in a second...

...But first, the bowl of complimentary kimchi! Nothing much to say here, except: it was GOOD. Slightly sweet, which surprised me, with a respectable spicy kick at the end, which really surprised me.

I guess their fried tofu side dish is somewhat famous, among some people. As it should be! It was absolutely absolutely absolutely delicious; I wish I'd ordered like four more of them. The tofu was super soft and slippery, with that slightly salty eggish flavor, and the breading had been fried to a perfect level of crispy flaky deliciousness. Yum! 

If you can get a piece from the bowl to your mouth without extra-soft tofu bursting out all over the place, you have achieved maximum level chopstick mastery.

I would normally not mention the obligatory cup of miso soup, but I think there was something slightly off about this one... A weird, unpleasant sort of taste. It might have had green pepper in it? Or something? I spent a long time trying to figure it out but have come to no conclusions. Be warned.

This is probably the trademark dish of this restaurant: the "Victory Rice Bowl", or 勝丼. I really like the character 丼 because it looks like a 井 ("well") with some stuff in it, and your typical 丼 is really just a fancified bucket of food. In this case, the rice at the bottom of the bucket has been topped with generous amounts of breaded chicken, onions, cooked egg, and raw egg. Apparently you're not supposed to wait for the egg to cook or anything; you just sort of mix all that junk into the rice with your spoon and have a go at it.

The chicken was good, as any chicken would be with that much batter fried onto it.

I personally ordered the BIG SHRIMP FOODBUCKET, which came with two big shrimp all breaded up and lookin' at me. Apparently you're supposed to eat them shell, legs, little pleading eyes and all, though I personally drew the line at their heads. Ahem. The rest of them was certainly nice and crispy though. It would be crispy, wouldn't it? Tempura shrimp shell?

My 丼 gets extra points for having lots of really well-cooked onions. The egg and whatever else might have been in it (I couldn't really tell) was also good, or at least not offensive. And yet the rice itself was only so-so. Pretty unfortunate, because the whole meal sort of depended on it. It meant that nothing about this 丼 really screamed "awesome" to me, not like those tofu bits did.

In conclusion I would say that, while I enjoyed this lunch experience, it was nothing TOO special. Still, it could have been much worse! Tofu connoisseurs are encouraged to stop by and check it out.

OVERALL RATING: 3/5

Great Rotary Granny Noodles

大圓環阿婆麵

No. 1, Zhongshan Heng Rd, Xinxing Dist
高雄市新興區中山橫路1號
(07)285-3165

Monday-Sunday
10:30am-7:00pm

English friendly: no
vegetarian friendly: no
average cost: 50-100NTD

I've been trying to figure out how to translate the name of this restaurant for a while now, and decided to give up. I doubt anybody uses its Chinese name anyway: to everyone I've talked to, it is "the duck noodle place", or (if one has to be specific) "the duck noodle place right outside exit 01 of the Formosa Boulevard KMRT station."

This is great for me, because I live right outside exit 01 of the Formosa Boulevard KMRT station. Yet somehow I hadn't eaten at this extremely famous (in business for 60 years and counting!) duck noodle stall until this afternoon, when a group of friends decided to go there for lunch. It was noonish on a Sunday, and as you can see the place was PACKED. Still, we lucked out and got a table in under five minutes.

Their menu is short but sweet: a limited variety of noodles to be topped with duck meat, shredded pork, wontons, or pig heart, in soup or in sauce. And yet the menu is still longer than it should be, because every single one of you is going to order duck noodles like we did.

We also got a plate of 滷味 ("stewed things") to start, which I believe consisted of extra-firm tofu and some random bits of duck. These included some really choice fatty pieces, as well as firmer dark meat, and the tofu was perfectly good! Nothing too special, but I was really hungry so I enjoyed it quite a bit.

For those who like noodles in soup, here are some duck noodles in soup! In a concerted effort to protect myself from Taiwanese creeping blandness disease, I'm trying to stay away from soups that were not initially conceived of as soups, so I went with the sauce option instead:

I think this may be one of the most beautiful pictures of noodles I've ever taken. The natural lighting probably helped, but so did the fact that they were absolutely delicious. The noodles themselves, though not handmade, were cooked to the perfect consistency. And once I mixed them up in the sauce...

...they attained noodle nirvana. The mouthfeel and all that junk were just spot on. My only complaint would be (can you see it coming?) that they were the tiniest bit bland, but a spoonful of hot pepper sauce went a good way towards alleviating this ailment. 

And the duck! Very rarely does a piece of meat strike me as "significantly better than any other piece of meat", but the chunks of duck pictured above tasted like the dark meat off a Thanksgiving turkey, or like the drumsticks off a supermarket rotisserie chicken... Good, is what I'm getting at. SINFULLY good. And served in very generous portions, as you can see.

There's a reason this place has been around for 60+ years! And at such crazy low prices, in such a crazy convenient location, there's no reason you shouldn't stop by to try it out.

OVERALL RATING: 4/5

Yuanxiang Beef Noodles

原鄉牛肉拉麵

No. 272-1, Senlin 1st Rd, Xinxing Dist
高雄市新興區森林一路272-1號
(07)235-7121

Tuesday-Sunday 
10:00am-8:30pm

English friendly: no
vegetarian friendly: ish
average cost: 70-100NTD

I've never completely understood how something as basic as beef noodles (read: beef, on top of noodles) could be considered a traditional Taiwanese dish, but it's near the top of almost every list of Taiwanese cuisine I've read so I'm not one to argue. It's sort of hard to define Taiwanese cuisine in the first place, which is probably why they keep making lists.

The first thing you'll notice about this place is that it is PACKED, even at noon on a Monday. That must be a good sign! But it was kind of a pain to wait for a place to sit and then get continually jostled by people reaching over for the hot oil. (Like hot sauce, but an oil... funny I never realized that doesn't exactly translate into English.)

They offer all sorts of animal parts--regular beef, cow ???, cow tendon, pig foot, mustard leaf and shredded pork--served on top of noodles in soup (拉麵, ramen) or noodles in sauce (拌面, in which you "拌" the noodles and sauce together by massaging the whole thing vigorously with your chopsticks). They also have wontons, soybean paste noodles (炸醬拌面, which I am pretty sure are a Beijing specialty...), and sesame paste noodles (麻醬拌面, your Taiwanese "traditional flavor" sauce of choice).

The beef noodles (in soup) came with beef in ball form (beefballs?) rather than slice form; what that means is up to you. The soup had a smoky 紅燒 flavor, and the toppings were fairly generous.

As were those of the mustard leaf and shredded pork noodles in sauce, a convenient choice for those among us who don't eat beef. (Common in Taiwan among descendants of farming families! Our discovery of Taiwanese culture through food continues.~)

I personally chose the sesame paste noodles, and I regret nothing.

If you only mix it a little bit, it looks kind of sketchy...

...But the end result is really good! Aaaah. 

These. Noodles. Were. Delicious. I definitely recommend sesame paste noodles of any kind for those of us missing peanut butter (it's basically sesame butter), but more than the sauce the noodles themselves were seriously quality. Thick and soft and chewy in all the right ways: that handmade, definitely-not-dehydrated-then-rehydrated feeling. UGH. I wish I could eat them all over again.

Another fun thing about this place is the selection of intriguing and sometimes horrifying side dishes up at the front counter. We decided on pickled cabbage and pig's ear, because. Well. Because.

The pickled cabbage was actually (SHOCKINGLY) quite special. It tasted almost exactly like that jar of homemade sauerkraut I made that one time in college--three ingredients: cabbage, salt, and LOVE, i.e. a week sitting on my shelf--so I'm pretty sure it has been made by hand as well. It has a really overpowering sauerkrauty flavor, and if you're into that it is totally delicious. 

The pig's ear was more there for shock value than anything else (wait until I tell my mom!) but it was pretty good too. I mean, it tasted mostly like fat and cartilage. Hard to mess up.

You should definitely take the crowdedness of this restaurant into account before going. Also a panhandler come around to our table multiple times during the meal and tried to sell us gum, then stood there staring silently when we said no... It may have been just that one time, but still. It was sort of uncomfortable. And probably because I'm white.

OH WELL. The noodles are worth it.

OVERALL RATING: 4/5