"Dinner @ TaoBan House, Daan District in Taipei City
It was a Saturday night and we were en route to a high-school reunion. My girlfriend hadn’t seen her classmates in a while and was excited… and although I didn’t know anyone, I tagged along because I’d never eaten at Taoban before.
Here’s what dinner at Taoban House (陶板屋), in the southern area of Taipei City looks like.
Being a large group we ordered the Taoban set. The set comes in at $499 each and consists of
- salad
- mulberry vinegar juice
- antipasto
- soup
- rice dish
- main
- dessert
- hot/cold drink
Salad
For my salad, I opted to have the smoked duck breast salad with grapefruit dressing.
Although only a few mouthfuls (sadly the case with most of Taoban’s menu items), I found the duck breast salad to be delicious. Grapefruit might sound like a bit of a weird dressing to have for a salad but it worked!
My girlfriend got the short end of the stick, ordering the seasonal fruit salad with seafood:
It didn’t taste bad but I think the best way to describe it was glorified coleslaw with some ground crab sticks.
Not wanting to order what I ordered, our salad choices pretty much set the tone of our orders for the rest of the meal…
…with me repeatedly coming out on top.
Mulberry Vinegar Juice
This was quite odd sounding to me, I don’t think I’d ever had a mulberry, much the less even know what they looked like.
That said, wow… talk about nice!
Quite difficult to describe it was like a sweet and sour juice but not in a Thai way. If I described Thai sweet sour soup as savoury, this was like a sweet, fruity alternative.
Delicious!
Antipasto
Baked King Oyster Mushroom was the only antipasto on offer.
I love mushrooms and eagerly wolfed down my serving.
Soups
Knowing that steak was coming later, I still couldn’t help myself and opted for the Beef Soup with Lilly Bulb.
I was a bit cautious on the lilly bulb, having had a terrible experience with flower soup before but thankfully the lilly bulb in this soup was mild. The beef broth was delicious and with more beef taste than lilly bulb, I was more than happy.
My girlfriend on the other hand felt a bit left out with her Cream of Mushroom soup:
Not that it tasted bad and wasn’t creamy, but having just come from the King Oyster Mushroom antipasto she was a little mushroomed out.
Rice
Again sticking to the meat dishes I ordered the plain sounding Steamed Rice with Beef and Basil’:
Again only a tiny portion was served but it was rich enough in taste to distinguish itself from being just rehashed fried rice. A nice light interlude after our soups.
Not too sure on the little black jar/pot thing the rice came in though, I felt a bit like Winnie the Pooh scooping out my rice…
My girlfriend ordered the Deep Fried Rice Ball with Shrimp in Pesto Sauce and…
…it wasn’t nearly as nice as my beef and basil rice.
Main
Taobao I believe translates into ‘pottery board’ so Taobao Steak (I think) is named after the way it is cooked, presumably on some kind of pottery board (pan?).
Either way, I ordered the Taobao Steak and had no regrets!
This was the one dish my girlfriend didn’t mind ordering the same thing I did so at least she had one decent dish.
Here’s how the Beef Steak with Garlic and Plum (sauce?) looked:
And somebody else ordered the simply titled ‘Steak and Fish Set’:
Dunno how they tasted but they sure looked good (although the fish set does look a little sloppy…).
Dessert
Only one dessert caught my eye and that was the Dark Chocolate Mint Mousse.
Painfully tiny in size, what few mouthfuls I could salvage only left me wanting more. I could have happily had a mousse block five or six times the size of what was served.
Other, less appetizing sounding desserts on offer were the Red Bean Flan:
And Orange Ice Souffle:
Drinks
Almost making up for the tiny serving sizes was this scrumptious Tiramasu Iced Coffee:
I’m a big fan of iced-coffee (I don’t drink the regular kind) and the addition of tiramasu to the coffee was a definite hit with me. Highly recommended.
The only other drink I got a snapshot of was the Iced Fruit Tea:
Rather plain looking (and no doubt tasting) in comparison to my iced-coffee I thought.
All up for $499 TWD ($16.90 USD) I thought Taoban House was pretty decent value.
With somewhat of a Japanese styling, the tiny serving sizes were kind of offset by the amount of courses offered (despite my expectations I wasn’t left hungry after the meal), but personally I would have preferred to knock off one or two of the items off the set in favour of larger serving sizes.
Still, as a nice pleasant alternative to beef noodles and your typical Taiwanese cuisine, Taoban House still has a distinctive Asian feel to it and there’s quite a bit of creativity behind the menu and presentation.
I think there are a few Taoban Houses around Taiwan, with the one we went to being easily accessible in Taipei City’s Daan District Area.
The nearest MRT station is the Technology Building Station on the Brown Line with a short walk down HePing East Road.
Guting Station on the Blue line is a few blocks to the west of the above map along HePing East Road, but the walk down is a bit longer and would probably be about 15 minutes.
Note that the entrance to Taoban House isn’t on Heping East Road, it’s actually on the smaller XinSheng South Road and consists of nothing more than a small staircase leading up:
A little difficult to find if you’re not expecting it. One would think they’d at least put some sort of signage there other than the menu… but hey, welcome to Taiwan.
February 21st, 2012 at 11:49 pm yi(Quote)
$16 for all that thats a bargain. then again, $500 TWD seems like a lot. i noticed your GF always got the short end of the stick on her pickings.
February 22nd, 2012 at 9:59 am ozsoapbox(Quote)
She lets me order first, because usually she has to translate something and then refuses to order what I order “because it’d be boring to have the same thing”.
Entirely her fault!