Black Dog Cafeteria

黑狗食堂

No. 115, Hexi Rd, Yancheng Dist
高雄市鹽埕區河西路115號
(09)20605876

Monday-Sunday
5:00pm-12:00am

facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/%E9%BB%91-%E7%8B%97%E9%A3%9F%E5%A0%82/193725557384619

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

This is the only exclusively open-air restaurant I've been to so far in Kaohsiung.

Coincidentally, the two evenings I've eaten here have also been among the coldest I've experienced so far in Kaohsiung. Pro tip: if it's raining outside, go somewhere else.

From what I've seen, this place is always really crowded. We surrendered in the face of the crowds last Saturday, and this Tuesday still had to wait ten or so minutes for a table. On a Tuesday! A cold Tuesday!

The Black Dog Cafeteria sells Singaporean food, which it turns out is mostly soups with noodles, hot pot, crabs and shrimps, and assorted fried things. Their traditional Singapore fried 蘿蔔糕 (radish cake) looks DELICIOUS, and their fried 粿條 (flat noodles) is confirmedly delicious.

As you can see by all the red crayon above, though, they are often out of... lots of things... so cross your fingers!

We started with this traditional Singaporean treat, wheat bread sandwiching a thick slab of butter and some strangely green jelly. It was really yummy, as you might expect. I don't know what flavor the jelly was, but it tasted sugary and sort of fruity and I'm not complaining.

My friend ordered the 肉骨茶麵 or meatbone tea-noodles, and they came with little hunks of 油條, the sugar-free Asian churro.

After a period of great indecision, and several furtive glances at other people's tables, I decided on the Malaysian curry. Not exactly a traditional Singaporean dish, but I regret nothing! This thing was not merely delicious, it was extremely delicious. The sort of delicious that you have to continually remark upon even as you're eating it, and that stays with you all night afterwards. 

The noodles looked sort of like the crispy French onions you put on top of green bean casserole, and I do in fact think they may have been fried to a crisp at some point, but when they got to me they were soft and puffy and soggy with curry. Quite the unique--and delicious--noodle experience. The curry itself was wonderful, thin and flavorful with the perfect hint of warming spice. Just what one needs on a cold evening eating Singaporean food out in the open.

Each time I've been here (and actually gotten a seat), I've enjoyed it immensely. This is the perfect restaurant for taking a few friends on a fun evening out: delicious, exotic, not too expensive, and complete with selection of two or three actually good beers.

Also, the interior design is all vintage and cool, and there are two big furry black dogs that wander around and let you pet them!

OVERALL RATING: 4/5

Shangpin Vegetarian Noodle House

上品齋素麵坊

No. 128, Qingnian 2nd Rd, Qianjin Dist
高雄市前金區青年二路128號
(07)215-2582

Monday-Sunday
11:00am-2:00pm
5:00pm-8:00pm

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

Most vegetarian restaurants in Kaohsiung are of the buffet variety, where you take what you want from a line up of watery vegetable and tofu dishes while strumming chanting music plays gently in the background, and the person at the counter estimates the cost of your plate using some unknown Buddhist wizardry.

That works great for a typical Tuesday lunchbox, but it doesn't really make for a good food blog, or an actual dining experience. Luckily for me I have the internet, and the internet showed me this: a vegetarian noodle house, not far from my house.

Their noodles are basically rice or flour noodles with sesame paste or ground "meat", with or without wontons, within or without soup. They also have some other soup soups, plus a selection of small dishes and organic/revitalizing/etc. drinks that will surely cure you of all those pesky free radicals.

PLUS they have vegetarian 滷味, or "stuff stewed in soy sauce"; you put what you want into a basket, then they help you stew it and it comes out looking like THIS:

At least it does if you order the thousand leaf tofu, mushrooms, and radish. This was really good, chock-full of 滷味 flavor (but really there is pretty much just the one flavor), especially while still warm.

I got miso soup, pictured above. I have to be honest, I was not a real fan of this. I suppose miso is usually made with fish paste, so this vegetarian version was lacking that fishy punch. That doesn't mean it had to be so bland, though. I mean, they could have at least added a bit more salt. (She mumbled, hopelessly.)

Instead of meatball soup this is happiness ball soup, apparently. I didn't taste it but I think we can all get a pretty good idea of it from the picture alone.

My friend got noodles with wontons, which looked like this. Almost identical to my...

 ...noodles without wontons! When they first came out I was like "huh", but that was because all the sauce was at the bottom. If you massage them with your chopsticks for a little bit they end up looking like this:

Ahhh, much better. I really liked these noodles. They weren't the best sesame paste noodles I've ever had (that honor, so far, goes to Yuanxiang Beef Noodles), but they were yummy. The sauce was subtly sesame-ish, and the noodles had a good consistency. The serving looked a bit small at first, but I actually found it to be quite filling.

I'm so glad to know about this restaurant. It gains billions of bonus points in my book for having a satisfying selection of tasty vegetarian options--and noodles, nonetheless!

OVERALL RATING: 4/5

Yayan Specialty BBQ

極野宴燒肉專門店

4th Floor, No. 789 Zhonghua 5th Rd, Qianzhen Dist
高雄市前鎮區中華五路789號4樓
(07)821-8080

Monday-Sunday
11:30am-3:00pm
5:00pm-10:00pm

English friendly: yes
vegetarian friendly: lol
average cost: 489/589NTD

Here we have another restaurant I ate at, left the city for two weeks, then came back and tried to write a review for. So this review is going to be heavy on the pictures and light on my distracted ramblings. That's probably better for all of us anyway.

It is also another high class mall chain restaurant! This time in the Dream Mall, and of the all-you-can-eat variety. That means you pay about $20USD and can stay there for HOURS (though actually I think they have a time limit of two hours...), gorging yourself on every item on their menu.

For some reason all-you-can-eat restaurants in Taiwan tend to be MUCH classier than those in the US, for a comparable price. I'm not a huge fan of stuffing myself with enormous quantities of food over the course of multiple hours, but once in a while it can make for a real nice treat. The number one thing that recommends this place over all other all-you-can-eat BBQ in Kaohsiung is this: all-you-can-drink beer.

I repeat: LIMITLESS BEER. 

All the ingredients required for a fun Thursday afternoon.

Their menu is pretty gigantic, with different sections for chicken, beef, seafood, etc, and full English (and Japanese) translations. And you can get anything you want off of it! Anything at all!

The waitress asked us if we wanted a pitcher of beer, coke, or roasted barley tea with our meal and we got ALL of them, because we could!

All menu items come raw, and you barbecue them yourself on the above charcoal stove thing. They put a grate on top of it, of course, and the waitress even came by after the first hour to switch out a new one not all covered in drippings. I tried to help her but I was pretty drunk by that point so.

All tables come with a free giant boat of raw seafood, which looks like this.

As well as some vegetables! We didn't dig into these until the end of the meal, when we started feeling guilty, but oh man! Those water chestnuts, the white things above, were totally awesome! Do not miss out on them.

Some sort of meat and stuff. By the way, each table comes with salt and pepper shakers (OMG, you can add SALT, the BESSSSST), as well as this soy sauce-looking sauce that does not taste like soy sauce, and goes quite well with meat of all kinds. Though not as well as salt does.

Thin strips of meat! Helpful tips for cooking these guys: lay them on the grill and watch a bit until you see their top sides start to "sweat", flip them over, and then take them off almost immediately. Devour them happily.

Scallops on ice! Someone who knows more than I intimated that these were fake scallops, because of the way they fell apart when you pulled at them or something. I'm no expert on scallops, but I thought they tasted pretty delicious all the same.

Fish in a dish! The aluminum pans you can put directly on the grill, and let the stuff inside slowly boil/bake. We also ordered their vegetables+cheese dish, which came in an aluminum pan too, but maybe we left it on the grill too long because when I finally tried it it was SERIOUSLY nasty. Like, sour milk kind of nasty. Not exactly sure what that was about.

Happy barbecuing. Everything here was really good. Those mushrooms on the right there were especially good. I love mushrooms.

Here is something funny. Their menu advertises a cheese-stuffed American beef dish, complete with sexy gratuitous pictures up there on the bottom right...

...And it turned out to look like this. False advertising! Except even with that little bit of cheese it was absolutely, absolutely delicious. Probably my favorite thing this entire meal. And we ate a LOT, can you tell? I don't think I even photographed half of it...

Cheesy beef rolls in action, and more shrimps. Yeahhhhh.

There are a few options for dessert, including this very charismatic Japanese mochi dish, meant to be barbecued for several minutes until crispy and chewy then drowned in condensed milk and peanut shavings, and eaten. DON'T MIND IF I DO. Each "order" comes with six pieces, so we got four orders because well.

I also got this VERY STRANGE pumpkin pie looking dish, with vanilla ice cream and random marshmellows. I forget exactly how it was advertised, but I know that when I bit into it I was definitely not expecting this:

Like, a sort of dry cake encasing a hunk of mochi and strawberry jam. What?

...What?

The ice cream was good though, and you can't go wrong with mochi I suppose.

Overall, I... I am mostly impressed that I ate so much. This was a really fun dining experience, not in the least because of the unlimited beer. So yeah, I definitely recommend it! It's not even that expensive, when you think about it. Several meals worth of food for the price of one.

OVERALL RATING: 4/5

Thai Town Cuisine

瓦城泰國料理

12th floor, No. 21, Sanduo 4th Rd, Lingya Dist
高雄市苓雅區三多四路21號12樓
(07)963-0262

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

website: http://www.thaitown.com.tw/index.php

English friendly: yes
vegetarian friendly: doable
average cost: 400-500NTD

I forgot to get a picture of the outside of this restaurant, but you've probably seen it before anyway! It's a common fixture in Taiwanese malls. This particular incarnation can be found in the FE21 mall, in the Sanduo shopping monstromegaopolis. Kaohsiung has a lot of malls, have you noticed?

Their menu is not TOO ridiculously huge but it has lots of words and lots of white space so it's sort of hard to capture in one picture... Instead, lets look at other pictures!

BTW, each meal comes with unlimited rice, either of the typical Japanese rice variety or the EXOTIC Thai rice variety. The latter is the same sort of rice you'd get in Indian restaurants: slighly longer, and sort of "shaggier" than the rice you're (assumedly) used to. It's nice to have something different once in a while, but I am personally of the opinion that Japanese rice is yummier.

I accidentally went on a two-week bicycle trip around Taiwan between eating at this restaurant and writing this review, so many of the details have faded from my mind. Ummm. Here we have a vegetable dish, with some hot peppers in it! It wasn't hot unless you ate a pepper.

This guy was great! Pad thai with bean sprouts and crushed peanuts. Can't go wrong with that.

Their classic (Taiwanese) Thai shrimp pancake comes in original, spicy, lemon grass, and whole wheat varieties. We got the whole wheat one, and it was incredible! I couldn't really taste the whole wheat--it was mostly just crispy shrimpy goodness--but one member of our party opined that this version is better than their original.

This, a beef curry thing. No complaints here. Not very spicy, but the curry was quite good.

I *think* this is pork, meant to be wrapped up in a lettuce leaf and eaten. The flavor was really odd: slightly oily, and quite sour. It was supposed to be spicy, I believe, but instead it was lemony and oily. I liked it, don't get me wrong, but I think I was the only one at our table that did.

This, some sort of chicken thing! It was good, but left me with no lasting impression.

I didn't have a chance to try this chicken rice wrapped in leaves thing, but for the record here is what it looked like. It got very high reviews!

I don't normally go for dessert but I'm glad I did. This here is warm coconut milk with all sorts of tapioca and sugary fruit things in it. Yummy yummy yummy!

So yeah. This is definitely a GOOD restaurant, and a nice choice for an evening out on the town. (Errr, does anyone have evenings out on the town in this city?) But for such high prices, I think their food should leave a more lasting impression. Typical high class mall chain restaurant, I guess.

OVERALL RATING: 3/5

Mountain Daughter Sapporo Ramen

樂山娘札幌拉麵

No. 92, Zhonghua 3rd Rd, Qianjin Dist
高雄市前金區中華三路92號
(07)272-8499

Monday-Sunday
11:30am-2:00pm
5:30pm-9:30pm

English friendly: no
vegetarian friendly: yes
average cost: 150-250NTD

If you like ramen, and you live right where I live, you are in luck! This "approved by real Japanese people!" ramen restaurant has a branch right next to my (your) house. 

The sign doesn't light up though, and it's sort of tucked away between two giant banks, so you might have to search a little bit before you find it.

The dirty, dark outside is matched by a dirty, bland inside. Also there was a SERIOUS funk in the air when I walked in. I refuse to accept this from any institution not in the business of selling stinky tofu!

Their menu is not English friendly (though it's got some pictures), and actually more Japanese friendly than Chinese friendy. All that hiragana and katakana kind of made me 眼花... 

It's a little expensive for noodles in these parts, but not too bad. At the bottom of this side of the menu they have a 170NTD vegetarian ramen option. They also offer Japanese curry on rice, and a nice selection of interesting appetizers.

I ordered the 強棒 ramen, on the assumption that I would receive "strong awesome" ramen. Well! This ramen was fine, but nothing spectacular. The egg was sort of overcooked and the pork was SERIOUSLY overcooked (or just... tough and chewy). The noodles were alright, though probs not handmade, and the soup was pretty okay. It wasn't REAL Japanese ramen though.

I... I think I've been having too much (too many???) noodles lately. The virtue of noodles being noodles is no longer enough. 

My friend got some sort of pork ramen thing that looked incredible, but was probably about the same.

We got their fried oysters appetizer, which was awesome. They were about 70% fried, 15% air, and 15% oysters, and the tartar sauce or whatever it was was more like a salsa in that it did not permit dipping whatsoever, but I managed to enjoy them in spite of these difficulties. They tasted like fried. Alright.

Their potstickers, or gyoza for the more culturally enlightened among us, were pretty much exactly like your standard supermarket freezer section potstickers, or those sold at your standard culturally unenlighted American Chinese restaurant. The skin was too thin for me, and the filling uninspiring.

I was initially inclined to give this place a 3, but as I write about it now I'm hard-pressed to remember anything I really liked. Their other menu options could very well be much better (it is supposedly famous, after all), but I don't want to go back to test my luck. Maybe if I get really, really hungry one of these days...

OVERALL RATING: 2/5

Not Old Sushi

不老壽司

No. 66, Fumin Rd, Zuoying Dist
高雄市左營區富民路66號
(07)348-4722

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

English friendly: yes
vegetarian friendly: yes
average cost: 400-500NTD

I don't know why I keep going to nearly identical restaurants within days of each other, but it certainly does help me make comparisons. I think this place is *slightly* better than the last sushi place, though it is not as creative.

The name actually does translate to "Not Old Sushi". It must be Japanese, for... something. I don't know, and I forgot to ask.

When I googled "Kaohsiung's best sushi" in Chinese, this place came up three times in the first five or so results. As you might expect, it is wise to make a reservation.

One of the first things I really liked about this place was how limited their menu is. I just hate going through page after page of stuff that can't possibly all be good.

This place sells only sushi, sushi rolls, and hand rolls, plus some assorted appetizers and soups and sake and things. The menu doesn't have any English but with so many pictures who even needs language, right?

We got the same complimentary appetizer as the last place, except this one was actually edible. I don't know why, but the raw onions didn't taste nearly as toxic; maybe it was because there was more sauce.

The wriggly smoked fish stuff (turns out it's made of fish) on top was still stinky and weird, but that's my own issue I think.

This is the "sea urchin roe muffin" hand roll, which I had not the pleasure of eating. (Supposedly it was really good.) Did you know that the word "muffin" in Chinese, translated phonetically as 馬糞, also means "horse shit"? This must be the major reason muffins have not caught on here.

The menu divides their sushi offerings into "raw", "vegetarian", and "cooked"; here is our raw sushi combo platter. I had the scallop, the squid (in front), one of the salmon, and the red tuna in the back. They were all... incredible. The scallop was super thick and smooshy, while the squid was chewy and hard in some places. It was enlivened by a distinct citrus flavor, some of which came from the adorable tiny slice of tiny lime on top of it. 

(For some extra dinner entertainment, try asking your Taiwanese friends the difference between a lime and a lemon. Most people I've met consider them the same thing.)

The raw fish sushi was also fantastic. The cuts of fish were extremely generous and oh-so-good... Sushi is so good you guys. So damn good. They also gave us lots of (real) wasabi and soy sauce for the table, which made it even better.

When we sat down the waiter was like, "Dish somethingsomethingsomething is today's special and we only have ten of them left!" So we seized the limited-time-only opportunity and it turned out to be this. It looks like those hunks of beef there should be tough and stringy, but they were actually incredibly... What's the opposite of tough? Tender? The piece I had really melted away in my mouth, it was so neat. The radish was also very well-cooked. No complaints here.

Here is our cooked sushi! Pretty sexy, yes? I had another scallop, charred on the outside and equally smooshy on the inside, and then some MAGICAL fish thing hiding behind that leaf (so delicious omg it was so delicious), plus some really good eel over there to the right.

And from the back row, I enjoyed a totally cute piece of mushroom sushi. You don't see mushrooms on top of sushi too often, but this place sells two different varieties! Mushroom lovers rejoice! This sushi really worked for me: nice and heavy and full of mushroom flavor. That white stuff on top of it was not cheese, but I don't remember what it was. It didn't have a huge impact on the overall taste.

Their miso soup was pretty standard. Nothing much to say here...

This one of their "famous" trademark sushi rolls. The pork in the middle was well cooked (a little stringy), but balanced out some by a mysterious squishy something a lot like raw fish... If you look closely you can see it glistening in the photo above. I have no idea what it was. There might also have been peanut shavings in there, or something... The whole thing tasted very much like one of those unorthodox Taiwanese breakfast sandwiches I used to buy on my way home from The Club. I liked it a lot! But it didn't really feel like sushi.

Our complimentary dessert was another bowl of slightly sweet bean soup, though this one was cut with purple rice and what I think were grapes. The latter gave it a fruity and refreshing twist, a little strange, but I think I liked it.

Even having eaten at them within a day of each other, it's hard to compare this place with Yilang Creative Sushi. They're both good! Sushi is good! Sushi is DAMN good! Treat yourself!

OVERALL RATING: 4/5