I rode home to my wife's consternation; why hadn't I seen her Line
message? We were late to our dinner reservation! I forgot why it was so
important to her to be at the restaurant on time; she had discount coupons that
expired at a certain time.
T.R Kitchen, hurriedly built earlier this year in typical Taiwan
Quonset hut style, is on a rented lot in the earthquake zone near the Dali
River (take the new Highway 74 up Dong-Shan Road, turn right on Jin-Fu 13th
Rd.) with pretty "Blue Sky White Cloud" steel bridge draped in LED
lights a block away. All the lots around the newly developed area are empty
weed gardens. This restaurant turned their empty next door to a heart-shaped
sandbox for kids with parents for lunch menu. Just this one restaurant stood, a
French-Italian menu, with an American fast-food strip mall name, "Time
Relax" Kitchen, but the initials, T.R (missing the second period) made it
sound debonair, if you use your imagination.
You had to use your imagination a lot to enjoy the experience at
this entry-level elegance Taichung eatery. One day, twenty years from now, if
it hasn't been demolished for the landlord to build another condominium, and if
I am still alive and able to eat more than Ensure supplement through a straw, I
will remember T.R Kitchen when it was new. It could be the foundation of
burgeoning scene of fine cuisine with the other starter-bistros on the street
popping up in the new Taichung Eastside, a potentially formidable
counter-balance to the overblown (and over-priced) affluent restaurant scene on
the Westside. Welcome to T.R Kitchen!
I have only one word to say about T.R Kitchen: tongue; Australian
beef tongue, a tender topping of wine sauce over the risotto underneath. It had
me taking out my smart phone to Goggle Junior's Restaurant in Brooklyn to
remind myself of the Jewish-style hot beef tongue on rye (back of the tongue,
please) but then, when I remembered I was in Taichung, and this was the only
beef tongue in town, and it was accompanied by soft jazz, sometimes
live, red wine, baby greens salad with a cube of head cheese, frozen
citrus aperitif, braised fish appetizer, a basket of airy homemade dinner rolls
with a dip of olive oil, cream of corn soup (the two weak spots on the menu),
fresh brewed coffee, ice-cream and brownie-pudding dessert, with the cherubic
teddy bear waitress trying not to look as green as the salad…did I mention you
have to use your imagination to respect this restaurant? Imagination is all
that you have to make it Paris, but at least the medallions of tender beef
tongue in wine sauce were real.
My wife, meanwhile, had their seafood risotto, and loved it, too.
The risotto was moist in seafood sauce and chock full of life-sized scallops,
mussels, shrimp, squid, sautéed with flavor and taste. The price for the set
dinner menu with a choice of entree was 750-1500NT, about $25-40 us. There was
plenty of parking because there were no other buildings outside. Andy, the
chef, a young man who learned his art at a four-star Westside hotel restaurant,
got the idea of using beef tongue from his former master chef, but he added the
vegetable broth and wine sauce that made it my future dream when something
unusually good and Western are on my palate-mind. Nana, the maitre d’ was a
lovely host with time in the casual un-crowded six table dining area to chat
with us after dinner. She called out Andy who was honored to have his dishes so
highly praised by two former New Yorkers, one of them a Westerner.
In Taichung, a city with a long way to go to before becoming
an Asian Western-cuisine gourmet refuge like Taipei, which is nothing compared
with Shanghai, which is nothing compared to Tokyo, Hong Kong, or any other
Asian or American city west of New York and excludes the entire European
continent. I have my list of Western restaurants with the city's one-only authentic
dishes for steak, lamb-chops, cold cuts and hamburgers (Belling’s), rye bread
and sourdough (Finga’s), French bread (Dance of the Bread), and pizza and
calzone (Palio) that keep this ex-pat sane in this wok-crazy culture. Add now
to this list T.R Kitchen for their seafood risotto, dreamy tender beef tongue
medallion risotto, and give me no lip.
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