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

Escape 41

海洋天堂歐風餐館

No. 41-2, Chaishan Da Rd, Gushan Dist
高雄市鼓山區柴山大路41-2號
(07)525-0058

Monday-Sunday
12:00pm-11:00pm

facebook: https://www.facebook.com/escape41.tw

English friendly: yes
vegetarian friendly: yes
average cost: 300-400NTD

To get to this restaurant you have to take a long journey through NSYSU on terrifying twisty mountain roads, wild dogs (and monkeys?) popping up on either side, then turn off onto a series of terrifying steep little streets that drop you unceremoniously at the ocean's edge.

So actually, getting here was the best part of the evening. One could even say, it all went downhill from there... Ho ho.

I didn't take a picture of the incredible outside seating, but FYI it is incredible. The tables look RIGHT over the ocean; there were even a couple of times I was afraid the waves would splash up onto our table. Smarter people than I should come here in the early evening to watch the sunset.

I'm extra glad we were able to sit outside, even though it was way dark and a little cold, because the playlist they had going on inside the restaurant was terrible. Its terribleness was further emphasised by the fact that there were NO other customers there. At 7:00pm on a Sunday. So. If you want to come here, better make it sooner rather than later. I think Escape 41 is not long for this world.

For those of you who haven't heard, the owner of this restaurant is an Australian guy famous in many circles for owning a restaurant while being Australian. So it's a Western restaurant, and is obliged to serve pizza and pasta. I was also intruigued to see a selection of scones(!), smoothies, and lasagna, all of them pretty rare in this hemisphere.

Most important for you all, I think, is their wide selection of drinks (alcoholic and non-)! Indeed I would recommend coming here to drink over coming here to eat; you'll see why in a second.

The best part of this meal was probably the soup of the day: a tart tomato vegetable thing with chucks of delicious garlicy croutons (surely handmade, because they were good). The croutons, the sharp flavor, and the soup-like consistency were all spot on. A western soup they might actually serve in a western country.

If only it hadn't been so good, I wouldn't have gotten my hopes up for the rest of the meal...

Here we have seaweed flavor French fries (and the ocean, hello!). These were definitely not bad; if you like blocky thick-cut fries you should be perfectly satisfied. The seaweed coating was also totes addictive.

But this. Oh, this. I ordered the "owner's special", a vegetarian pizza with pesto, mushrooms, onions and all other sorts of things that are supposed to be delicious. This pizza was so bad I actively disliked eating it. The crust was completely tasteless/textureless, the onions were undercooked (as white as freshly fallen snow), the cubes of fried potato... were cubes of fried potato (whyyy), and there was something SERIOUSLY WRONG with the pesto. It probably had basil in it, somewhere, but the sour kind that goes with beef noodle soup. NOT the type you put on a pizza.

The ham and cheese lasagna my friend ordered was slightly better, but still pretty bad. Think "soggy microwave lasagna" quality. It was waaay too mushy to be served in any respectable Western restaurant--but of course this is Taiwan.

I want to give this place a 2/5, based soley on the horror that was that pizza, but I think the location and the drink menu can make up an extra point. Just don't get your hopes up about the food.

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

Mr. Star Dim Sum Restaurant

星仔茶餐廳

No. 40-3, Lingya 2nd Rd, Lingya Dist
高雄市苓雅區苓雅二路40-3號
(07)338-3466

Monday-Sunday
10:00am-9:00pm

English friendly: no
vegetarian friendly: yes
average cost: 100-200NTD

Despite the name, this is not a dim sum restaurant as I would define it: no carts stacked with baskets of small goodies, no servers heckling you in aggressively accented English, no accidentally ordering more than you can eat (or afford). It is a Hong Kong restaurant, though. In fact it veers dangerously into "themed restaurant" territory (which almost always means horrible food). The second floor is decorated with all sorts of fun vintage Hong Kong paraphernalia; I might even have photographed some of it, if I were THAT kind of food-blogger. I'm not though.

Having been to Hong Kong twice for visa reasons, and once read a Wikipedia article, I know a little something about Hong Kong cuisine. What with the years of British occupation and whatnot, Hong Kong has a history of very INTERESTING east-meets-west fusion dishes. Think tacky American kung-fu movies, but with food. You'll see what I mean in a minute.

On top of not being English friendly, this place is barely Mandarin friendly. Their entire menu is written in Cantonese, so it makes no sense and ordering food becomes a fantastical lottery adventure. Even the Chinglish is different: 三明治 ("sandwich") becomes 三文治, 巧克力 ("chocolate") becomes 朱克力, 吐司 ("toast") becomes 多士, and 泡麵 ("12¢ instant noodles") is disguised as 公仔麵. If only I'd known that before I ordered them...

Luckily the menu has a few pictures, or I would have been completely lost. I saw this guy on there and instantly knew I had to order it...

Aaaaaaaah. The beautiful monstrosity above is French toast stuffed with red bean and drowned in condensed milk. The red bean filling was really well cooked, and the bread was moist but not soggy. It was sweet, real sweet, but not in a sickening way. Absolutely delicious.

My friend ordered a pork and egg 三文治, and it came in a bag. Just what you want to see at a restaurant, like your dinner has been waiting in a refrigerator since morning.

These sort of sandwiches are common "Western" (I laugh but I'm crying inside) breakfast food in Taiwan, and of course the French toast above would also be nice in the morning. Yet oddly enough, this restaurant only opens for lunch and dinner. An interesting business decision on their part!

The opposite side of their impenetrable menu has a wide selection of interesting and/or horrifying drinks. And so we embarked on another drink adventure!

On the left is my friend's "somethingsomethingsomething fresh milk"; on the right, my "salty lemon seven." The mysterious "fresh milk" drink certainly looked like fresh milk, but it tasted mostly like 7-UP with a subtle undertone of whole cream.

It TURNS OUT that the "seven" in my drink stands for 七喜, which is Mandarin too: Mandarin for "also 7-UP." The "salty lemon" refers to that slice of extremely salty cured lime, assumedly an authentic Hong Kong food(?) item.

WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY.

That's all I have to say.

Like I said, the menu mislead me into ordering this bowl of glammed-up instant ramen. It was topped with cheese, which was fun; the quintessential example of peculiar decisions made in Hong Kong kitchens. Unfortunately the cheese was pretty skimpy (that up there is mostly egg), though the soup was good.

But when I was finished with the soup it was still just a bowl of instant noodles... This shit would never fly in AMERICA, dammit. People here seem to think that instant noodles are just another type of noodle, as worthy of respect as udon or pasta. Well, I respectfully disagree!

And here we have dessert! This is 甜不甩. What does that even mean. Well I guess it means 湯圓, or "soup balls", topped with peanuts. Soup balls are like mochi, but different from mochi because they have to be steeped in soup, but really pretty much exactly like mochi. Maybe less sweet. I thought this dessert would be super sugary, but it was sort of... not. I think they skimped on the syrup at the bottom of the dish. Still, it was good. As I always say, one can never go wrong with crushed peanuts!

On taste alone I would probably give this restaurant a 3/5, but I had a really fun time puzzling over the menu, then puzzling over what they delivered to our table. It was a nice break from the ordinary! So if you're in the mood for an adventure, I recommend you pay Mr. Star a visit.

OVERALL RATING: 4/5

Yang Bao Bao Steamed Dumplings

楊寶寶蒸餃

No. 106, Chaoming Rd, Nanzi Dist
高雄市楠梓區朝明路106號
(07)351-3322

Monday-Sunday
11:00am-2:00pm
4:00pm-1:00am

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

This place is waaay far away up in the north of Kaohsiung County, just outside Kaohsiung City, so you're on your own as far as getting there. Still, as long as it's in Kaohsiung it's fair game I think. Besides, this place is famous!

Real famous, even. We went at 1:45pm on a Friday, 15 minutes before closing (and they do stop serving food at 2:00pm as advertised), and still had to wait in line. What on earth could all these people be so excited about...?

Well! This place is pretty much all 麵食 ("oily wheaty carbs") like I like: dumplings, pot stickers, and scallion pancakes in a plethora of forms. Plus soup! Unfortunately both their chicken and beef soups had sold out by the time we got there. I was told that these soups are famous, but I was also told that most things on this (admittedly limited) menu are famous so I don't know what to believe. Lots of food around here is famous, have you noticed? One of these days I'd like to get to the bottom of this. Like, is there a magazine everyone reads or something? Entertainment Tonight, but for noodle shops, and stinky tofu stands? And soups?

Speaking of tofu, I got me a little dish of tofu for a starter. It photographed really nicely, didn't it? It tasted almost as nice: extra-firm tofu glazed with some sort of slightly-sweet BBQ sauce. Good and protein-y. But near the end I accidentally mistook the anise for an oddly-shaped bit of tofu and would DEFINITELY NOT RECOMMEND making the same mistake. Bleuuuuuuurgh. For those of you who don't know, anise tastes like licorice and makes you want to vomit on the spot.

This here is their "pork rolled pancake." I am of the opinion that stuff rolled up in pancakes is the consummate form of food, even above food stuffed in other food, so I was really excited when these appeared on our table. The spiralled cylindrical form is satisfying in itself, viscerally (that is a pun that is a pun, oh just look at that pun), and it tasted pretty good too! There was another BBQ-type sauce inside that complimented the whole thing quite well. I don't think the pork was especially flavorful or anything, but the pancake was delicious like all scallion pancakes, ever.

I've found that soup in Taiwan generally comes in one of two flavors: sweet-and-sour, and corn. This is corn soup. It was not as sickeningly rich as that stuff I made from souppowder that one time in my house (but let's not drag my cooking adventures into this), so that was nice. Again, I would classify this dish as "good."

This thing was somewhat curious! What we have here is 烙餅. Apparently the only thing that differentiates 烙餅 from your traditional 蔥油餅 or scallion pancake is that somebody's messed it up a bit, at the cost of an extra 10NTD. Its shredded nature makes it almost impossible to share with others, because every time you pick up a piece in your chopsticks the rest of the damn thing comes along with it.

In a most peculiar turn of events, this thing had no flavor whatsoever. My friend suggested it might be sweet, and I was sure from looking at it that it was going to be salty and oily and awesome, but instead... nothing. We gave it a hearty sprinkling of Taiwanese MSG peppersalt, and by the end I starting dipping it in the sauce for my dumplings, but to little avail. A mess of wheaty disappointment!

I chose their "flower vegetarian" steamed dumplings. They came in a unit of eight, each one stuffed super plump with a mash of yummy green veggies; the skin was thin, with a nice flavor of its own. I was told that this restaurant's (famous!) beef and pork dumplings leak soup when you bite into them. These didn't, undoubtedly because of their veggie character. Still, when dipped in soy+ginger+spicy sauce, they were quite delicious! On the higher end of vegetarian dumplings, definitely.

APPARENTLY this place is SO famous that people outside Kaohsiung know it too. I don't really get what all the fuss is about... It was good, certainly, as well as cheap (yay!), but I wouldn't make the trip again.

OVERALL RATING: 3/5

Andy's Pizza Garden

安迪的披薩花園

No. 273, Yucheng Rd, Zuoying Dist
高雄市左營區裕誠路273號
(07)557-2889

Monday-Sunday
11:30am-10:00pm

facebook: https://www.facebook.com/toaroach

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

The first Taiwanese food blog I opened up in order to copy+paste the pertinent information above (ahem) advertised this place as "高雄老外公認最好吃的家鄉味披薩喔": "widely accepted among Kaohsiung foreigners as the most delicious hometown flavor pizza!" That's what I concluded too, when on a whim this afternoon I googled "Kaohsiung best pizza" in English on The Internet. Well, *I* am a Kaohsiung 老外 too and I'm here to tell you that it is NOT the most delicious hometown flavor pizza in Kaohsiung. It can't be, it just can't.

It is definitely a foreigner's pizza place though: most of the reviews online are in English, as were a majority of the Tuesday night customers.

Their pizza is made by hand and cooked in a brick oven right in front of the shop. Just look at the American neon sign! The quaint pile of chopped wood! How could it possibly go wrong? 

Our first sign should have been the complete dearth of customers when we entered at 6:30pm on a Tuesday...

The do get props for having reasonable prices, and an actually English English menu. I say this place is "overly" English friendly because the waitress, assumedly the hot Taiwanese wife of the charateristic Californian expat owner (for the record all I'm going on here is his purple tye-dye T-shirt), was the type to respond to me in English when I talked to her in Chinese. This kind of behavior really pisses me off, but your mileage may vary.

Though it is Andy's Pizza Garden, we both ordered calzones. WHATEVER. I can no longer make dining choices based on what would be good for the blog. That way lies madness. A calzone is pretty much a pizza anyway, and a very rare creature in Kaohsiung besides. Apparently in Chinese it translates to 披薩餃 or "pizza dumpling", which is adorable.

The name was the best part about it though. I chose the "Niaosong Veggie" calzone, medium, with extra olives. Their menu has a wide selection of additional toppings for minimal extra charge, though they don't have artichoke hearts anymore because "no one orders them" (what did you think I was trying to do?!?) and I don't actually remember any olives ending up in my calizone. SO.

I was promised mushrooms, broccoli, spinach and other vegetables stuffed along with feta cheese (and olives, dammit!) into a lovingly homemade pizza shell; what I got was soggy broccoli, onions, other bland vegetables (maybe just more onions) punctuating giant gobs of tasteless mozzarella cheese inside a tasteless powdery pizza shell. If I hadn't seen feta cheese inside, I wouldn't have known it was there.

My Taiwanese friend ordered a meat calzone, purported to come with ham, beef, pepperoni and Italian sausage. On the Chinese side of the menu only it was marked as "relatively salty." How cute is that! I'm not making this stuff up you guys. It was in fact salty, or should I say sharp, due to the sausage. Overall I liked it more than mine, but it had the same issues I'm about to discuss below.

Ahem! I think the problem with this place is twofold. Number one: the dough. The dough has no flavor of its own, assuming you don't consider "overly floured" a flavor. Yeasty, greasy, flaky, crispy... Really, anything would be better than this powdery mass of disappointment.

I snapped this picture of a calzone baking in the brick oven on the way out. Look how cute and plump it is! (A medium was more than enough for one person, by the way. You won't feel like finishing it anyway.) But also notice its color. That, my friend, is the color of flourpaste.

Number two: the cheese. I am forced to consider that it may just be more difficult to purchase good quality cheese in Taiwan. This place doesn't use pre-sliced orange American cheese from Carrefour, but I almost wish they had... At least that stuff has a cheesy kick to it, chemical induced though it may be. I'm very unused to having consumed such large quantities of melted cheese and feeling so "ehhh" about it. It's almost frustrating, like I've been cheated somehow.

I realize this review is a little harsh, but I can't help it. My expectations were too high going in, and I came out utterly disappointed. I have no desire to go back here again. A shame, because I hear that they sell handmade liquid nitrogen ice cream on weekends.

OVERALL REVIEW: 2/5