violist
Sep 3, 00, 7:11 am
This is an old stale but I hope entertaining report
that I resurrected because it's somewhat germane to
Viking's query about Taipei:
Date: 23 Nov
First halting steps ...
I guess a prime piece of advice is: don't take a
breakfast flight. The food really stinks, for one
thing; no wonder they are opening food courts in all
the airports.
Took the land of nod special so I could have lots of
cushion for the Pacific flight at 2 - got to the
airport at 7 for an 8 am flight and was put directly
into my lovely 15A seat (lots of leg room, the first
row of coach). It turned out that that day they had
grossly undersold the flight, so one of the FAs
announced that anyone who wanted to sleep could stake
out a row of 3 middle seats (which of course I did).
Nice nap, 3 hr or so punctuated with breakfast, which
was either fruit and yogurt or the World's Worst
Parmesan quiche (texture of wet cake, no crust, very
strong off-cheese flavor) sided with the World's Worst
Fruit Cup (melon that could not be cut or even forked
up with the plastic utensils provided). And to top it
off, the ground support had forgotten to load headsets
onto the plane, so people watched the movie in silence
or not at all. Seatback Airmap didn't work (this is the
feature that I described this April - flight data and
computerized image to let you know where you are and
how fast you are going). One of the aft toilets didn't
work (I got it to work briefly, but I noticed late in
the flight when I went to stretch my legs that it was
beginning to overflow - and as the plane started the
steeper part of its descent, the raw sewage began to
drip down the aisle! I was glad I was 20 rows ahead.
Got in to SFO a little early and went to the domestic
airside RCC where I discovered to my chagrin the best
thing to eat was Ricola cough drops. So then I headed
to the international club, where there was fresh fruit
plus some of the most delicious rice crackers (deep
fried) I've ever had (of course, the Tokyo flight was
about to leave, so these all disappeared into the
pockets of the discerning). Bb. eventually met me
there, and soon it was time to emplane. We heard her
name called, and behold there was an operational for
her ... but not for me. Bless her heart, she
complained on my behalf, but they said they had
allocated upgrades based on last name. Advice from
the gate agent: "change your name to something
starting with A"! I sat in 35A, the first exit row in
coach, next to a pleasant Chinese guy named Jim. I
thought, what luck, I can get restaurant tips, but as
it turned out he hadn't been there since '91, I ended
up giving more information than he gave me. Dinner:
"Tangerine beef Szechuan Designed by international Chef
Martin Yan". I enjoy the guy on TV but do occasionally
point out that he's not that great a cook ... I don't
know how much to blame he is for this meal, which was
one of the most horrible I can recall. The beef (all
2.5 oz of it) was gristly and tough and overdone and
flabby all at the same time, and it came in an acrid
gelatinous sauce that may have met a tangerine in its
youth. The rice had hard bits and mushy bits and not
much in between. The veg was a fairly respectable
kimchee, though. They also served a shrimp salad, which
consisted of several tablespoons of moldy fishy tiny
shrimp and some wilted greens; I doused it with some
soy sauce (from a very cute little Kikkoman bottle that
came with, the same way MREs came with little Tabasco
bottles) but still couldn't eat it. Bb. reports that
she had Szechuan stir-fried shrimp with e-fu noodles:
the shrimp were good and fresh; the noodles were good,
not mushy; but the sauce (thanks again Martin Yan) was
disgusting, and luckily most of it was on the side of
the plate. Dessert was a fruit plate made up of rejects
from the breakfast fruit plate.
United 845 was a smooth but very lengthy (13 1/2 hrs)
flight, during which time I heard the Mozart 5th violin
concerto about 8 times. There was an open snack bar
nearby: little envelopes of snack mix, juices, water,
and lots of automat turkey sandwiches. I had just
water, thank you. As we climbed over the Aleutians, we
were served a bowl of chicken ramen (quite good) with a
half ounce of Tillamook Cheddar (aged at least 60
days). Not a good idea to serve milk products to a
plane full of Asians, and at this point one of the
great disadvantages of row 35 became apparent: people
congregated there waiting for the bathroom, and Jim and
I got more than our share of flatulence in the face.
Eventually I gave up and went back to sleep (what else
is new) and was woken up shortly before arrival with a
small plate of chicken rice. I think it was supposed to
be chi you fan, which is rice dressed with chicken fat
and with a few shreds or dice of chicken tossed on top;
it was instead chicken in brown sauce on hard-crusted
rice. Not too too bad, but not too too good, either.
But the Connoisseur class snack was apparently worse:
"baked potato and bacon chowder with garlic cheese
focaccia." I hear the focaccia was especially
egregious. We gained a bit of time on the flight, and
by scheduled arrival we'd already cleared ROC customs!
Then it was off to hire a taxi and many adventures, the
culinary of which I will chronicle here soon.
Date: 23 Nov
Street food is where it's at.
There are all kinds of shops and stalls, but the
selection is kind of limited.
There are the oyster pancake places (that's all they
serve). Just like hangtown fry, with a squirt of oyster
sauce on top. Last time I was in Taichung one made me
really sick, and I am sure I've never been the same
since. Avoided these places, even despite how wonderful
the food looked.
There are noodle places everywhere: basically, you get
a big mound of greasy brown noodles and get some
stir-fried stuff to go on top. I figure I can do as
well at home and without a language barrier, so we
passed on these. There are also noodles and stew
places: the stews are pretty standard, also things I
can cook: red-cooked eggs; red-cooked pork belly;
boiled bok choy or other cabbage; boiled pig
intestines; boiled pig liver; red-cooked spleen. Yumm.
In Taichung and Hualien in years past I found more
seafood at this type of place and did eat there; this
time, as it appeared to be pork parts season, we passed
them up as well.
As I have a high tolerance for grease, I was kind of
amused by the sausage stands.
You get a regular Chinese sausage, hsiang chang, for
US$1: they throw your chosen sausage into a vat of
boiling oil, and when it floats, it's ready.
They also have (prepared the same way) a sort of boudin
blanc, a big fat white rice sausage, for NT$20 (67c). I
had one; it tasted okay, but it's essentially plain
white rice and a bit of garlic (faintly perfumed with
five-spice or star anise as well) stuffed into a 4"
length of hog casing. The guy spears it on a stick,
rolls it in meat juice, and then you get to put hot
sauce on it, which is good.
The coolest thing is to have a white sausage cooked and
split in two like a bun, with a Chinese sausage stuck
in like a hot dog. Also slathered with hot sauce.
Most Chinese don't munch food in public, although
nobody stares at you or laughs if you do. I finessed
potential embarrassment by going out after dark
(bruised shins but not ego). When Bb. was hungry during
the day we found a secluded place in one of the many
parks and ate there (other people do this too).
Date: 23 Nov
I guess the street food of choice is the buns and dim
sum. These are not that much better than at good places
in the States, just more abundant. Also very cheap.
A sampling of what we had various places:
Bawdz (buns) -
Mushroom, cabbage, shiitake, glass noodle buns: tsai
bao (cai bo). Really nice, with good flavors and an
intriguing texture. These appear to sell out quickly.
Meat buns: rou bao. The closest thing to a burger: a
meatball made with scallions or vegetables and ground
pork with or without additional lard.
Garlic chive buns: jou tsai bao. All I can say is,
remember to buy one for each of your friends. A strong,
almost acrid garlic taste; not unpleasant, but mighty
assertive; sticks with you all day.
Shumai -
Regular ones: ground pork and vegetables in a wrapper,
steamed; some have shrimp and/or extra pork fat in
them. My favorite.
Yellow ones: slightly more delicate, but other than
that I can't see what the difference is.
Odd ones: as above, but the pork is mixed with frozen
mixed vegetables (corn, carrots, peas).
Miscellaneous -
Sharkfin dumplings: we had these two places. One of the
places had glass noodles to simulate shark fin; the
other didn't even bother. These are mostly pork and
shiitake ground up together in a biggish dumpling the
shape of a shark's fin. Pretty good, although I found
that on Taiwan they tended to be sweetened.
Meatballs: just big blobs of the filling from the
insides of the dumplings, seasoned with the ubiquitous
A-1 sauce (which has a common knockoff called Bulldog
sauce). Nothing special, but I can't see how one could
make them special.
Gelatinous things: I used to know their name, but I've
forgotten in my old age. A big square of rice dough
with pork, scallions, and A-1 and soy sauces in the
middle; steamed, or sometimes steamed and then
pan-seared. I like them a lot; I can see how westerners
might think they were a little peculiar.
Taro balls stuffed with meat: ground pork in hoisin
sauce wrapped in a ball of taro root and deep fried. I
like these a lot.
Sweet taro balls: As above, only the stuffing is red
bean paste and salted duck egg yolk. Heaven in the
mouth, take it from me.
Have I forgotten anything? Well, the sarsaparilla is
good (although I injured my hand again trying to open
the bottle), at 80 c for a half liter bottle.
Date: 23 Nov 99
A set meal at Hunan Garden, Lai Lai Sheraton. I thought
it pretty good (and not that bad a deal at $60 a person
all inclusive) even though there was nothing
particularly Hunanese about it, besides the fact that
there was lamb. I think it was more a child's
introduction to weird and expensive Oriental
delicacies, which was fine with me. Here in not exact
order is what we had, menu descriptions theirs.
Braised abalone in chicken broth. Excellent abalone,
fresh, a couple not too generous slices, sided with
pretty standard pork meatballs with a thinnish chicken
broth ladled over. Abalone tastes sort of like conch,
sort of like clams, etc. etc., only better. It is
grotesquely expensive, and I guess there's some
mythological or traditional-medical significance. This
was the first thing that came, and I think it was the
best (not that anything else was bad, mind you, just
that this set a standard few meals could live up to).
Chicken consomme with shark's fin. Shark fin too is
grossly expensive, which I find odd as sharks are
pretty common. It's not a particularly tasty item -
sort of gelatinous, slightly fishy, a little
reminiscent of undercooked rice noodles. This came as a
couple substantial hunks of the stuff in a very thick
but unsalted chicken broth. You're supposed to
subordinate everything to the taste of the shark fin, I
guess, but I added salt and pepper anyhow (even if this
horrified the help, they didn't let on). Shark fin is
supposed to promote vigor and long life, that sort of
stuff. Only time will tell.
Chicken consomme with bamboo pith. A thinner soup with
cloudlike blobs of faintly-flavored bamboo inside. Not
bad - but another sort of, you know, what's the point
type of dish.
Scallion pancakes (standard) accompanied the soupy
things.
Steamed spotted garoupa with scallion sauce. Excellent
firm fish (I'd have liked it a little less done,
though) steamed with ginger and scallion, the liquid
given up by the fish reduced to a rich sauce and
enriched with rice wine and a touch of soy. One of the
fish dishes of a lifetime. Garnish for both fish
dishes: steamed broccoli, excellent.
Steamed sea bream with cumin cordia. Quite similar to
the above, except that the fish was tender rather than
meaty (I thought it was sea bass), and there was a
touch of spice in the sauce - but I have no idea what a
cumin cordia is.
Braised sea cucumber stuffed with pork. More gelatinous
gooey iodiney stuff. But fresh (I've never had it fresh
before: it's only marginally better). Stuffed with
mince and in a sweetish thick soy-based sauce.
Steamed scallops with gourd. Dried scallops,
reconstituted, shredded; gourd I think is bitter melon.
This was a wet, strange dish, extremely fishy and
strong in flavor, but not bad for that.
Steamed lobster with garlic sauce. Half an Australian
bug steamed and with a very intense garlic-based sauce,
with a few garlic chives thrown on top. Quite a dish -
one of the few times I thought there was too much
garlic!
Braised chanterelle with oyster sauce. These weren't
chanterelles but rather some other kind of mushroom
that I am not familiar with. Mild mushroomy flavor went
well with a sweet oyster sauce. The texture of the
mushrooms was very peculiar: firm and spongelike in
parts, but what must have been the gills were cooked
until they separated in fiber-like strands.
Sauteed beef with pea sprouts. Pretty much what it
says, a bit of green pepper added for flavor. Pea
sprouts of course taste like greens and like peas at
the same time - one of my favorite vegetables.
Baked lamb chops. Actually I think pan-broiled,
medium-well (the Chinese tend not to do rare meat),
served with a thick sauce flavored with five-spice.
Good chops, rather gamy but very pleasant.
Fancy sweet soup. Red kidney beans in a slightly
sweetened starchy broth. A standard, but you have to
learn to like it (I did many years ago, but then I had
a head start).
Fancy dessert. A couple of silly little steamed buns
filled with lotus seed. Fancy indeed! You get them for
15c each at the street vendors!
Fresh seasonal fruit. These were kiwi, melon, grapes -
very standard, and I was slightly disappointed as I'd
seen several exotic fruits in the markets (mangosteens,
for example); but this was the Sheraton, after all. The
fruit had been lightly salted, which makes for a
strange (to Westerners) effect.
Kirin Ichiban beer. I can't tell you how much better
the Japanese version is than the stuff you get here in
the US (the latter is brewed at the Budweiser plant in
LA).
Date: 23 Nov
Buffet of traditional Taiwan foods at Tiffany's
restaurant at the Taipei Hilton.
Despite the restaurant's name, it was packed with
Chinese and Japanese families - all the white folks
were across the way at Dynasty, where you get normal
food. My friend Bb. was the only non-Asian there. This
is what we had all we could stuff ourselves with for
$15 a head counting tax and tip.
Meatball and melon soup. Pretty standard meatballs: the
Taiwanese like to mess with their meatballs so the
texture is both mushy and rubbery at the same time.
This may be sort of offputting to the noninitiated. The
standard combination is ham and melon soup, but I bet
this is cheaper. The melon, by the way, is the winter
melon (doong gwa, or a larger version of moqua), which
is sort of turniplike in flavor and not sweet at all. I
liked it okay.
Boiled vegetable in soup with shrimp dumpling. A kind
of bok choy, quickly blanched to order and dunked in a
light chicken broth. The shrimp dumpling turned out to
be coarse-chopped shrimp bound with a little egg white
and nothing else. You could also add other things to
your soup if you wished - minced fish, minced ham,
scallions, whatever.
Smoked shark. A pretty standard taste, but not salted
as most Western salt fishes are. Good firm fish cut so
that each piece had a thin line of gooey cartilage on
one side.
Steamed egg with fish. Almost exactly like the
scrambled egg dish I expounded upon about 5 years ago,
with lots of little embryonic fish. A pretty expensive
dish, as the fishies are hard to come by. The taste is
kind of unremarkable; you could almost duplicate it by
making scrambled eggs and stirring in a few teaspoons
of shredded rinsed chunk white tuna. As with a lot of
things, it's the rarity that is supposed to impress.
Cuttlefish with vegetables. Extremely tender cuttlefish
with various standard vegetables but mostly onions in a
brown soy- based sauce. Because of the onions, a little
sweet for my taste.
Salt roasted shrimp. Not very salty, but extremely
crunchy outside and meltingly tender and sweet inside,
as they had been cooked at a very high temperature.
Served whole (eyes, antennae and all) with shell. I ate
the shells but not the head (I find the guts sort of
bitter). Extraordinary shellfish flavor. Certain other
people, who shall remain nameless, refused to eat
anything that stared back from the plate.
Eel with young leeks. Stewed eel, mild but slimy, with
sauteed yellow garlic sprouts (not young leeks, as the
restaurant claimed). More soy sauce. I had two
helpings, one for me and one for my eel-o-phobic
friend Dave in absentia.
Seashell salad. Shredded carrot, bean threads, and some
unidentifiable long thin strips of seafood (looked like
the outside beard of a clam). Sesame oil dressing. Very
odd.
Fried crabs. Super excellent. Half crabs just sitting
there; you have to eat them with chopsticks, and as the
shells are on, it's a tough job - I ended up eating
most of the shells, and to heck with my digestion. No
sauce, no nothing, just plain fried crabs.
Squid balls. Minced squid formed into patties, seasoned
with A-1 sauce, coated in Panko, and deep fried. I
didn't get one, but I ate Bb.'s reject (she took one
bite and decided that it wasn't for her). I liked it
but not enough to go over and get one for myself (in
retrospect, I should have).
Roast goose. Really steamed goose rubbed with sweet
spices. Okay, a little gamy. As this was a free-range
Chinese bird, there wasn't much fat. As it was cut in
the Chinese style, there were little shards of bone all
over the place.
Chicken with basil. They said it was sauteed, but it
was really a standard red-cooked (i.e. stewed) bird
with a bit of basil flavoring. I had only one little
piece: I can make it better than that, after all.
Spicy braised beef tendon. Also called aromatic beef.
This is beef shin red-cooked with five-spice powder and
red chile, then molded into a loaf, chilled, and sliced
thin: sort of foot cheese, if you will. Great stuff,
one of the southern Chinese classics.
Pork with turnips. The least successful dish in the
room. Boiled pork with boiled turnips. That's it.
Many-flavored egg. Interesting. You start with
1000-year eggs, put them in a regular savory egg
custard, and top this with slices of salted duck egg.
Steam until firm. A really neat dish, and the slices
with their cross-sections of various kinds of egg
looked like modern art.
Steamed pork buns. Regular thing. Mince and scallions,
seasoned with soy, folded into bread dough and steamed.
Steamed spare ribs in black bean sauce. We didn't try
this: the ribs looked kind of forlorn.
Shumai. A little on the unsubtle side - wrappers a
little thick, meat a little too meaty. Not enough
seasoning or finesse, I guess.
Rice balls. Actually meatballs just like in the soup,
but steamed instead of boiled in the soup.
Turnip cake. A Chinese classic. Shredded turnip bound
in rice flour, steamed, sliced, pan-fried. A sprinkling
of minced ham tops it off. Interesting mixture of bland
and sudden BURSTS of flavor.
Guava slices. Soaked in salt water, and also unripe. So
more sour and salty than sweet.
Tomatoes. Which in China are eaten as a fruit.
Orange segments. Little yellow shrivelled oranges that
looked like not too fresh lemons. Sweet and tasty,
though.
Tapioca soup. Little tapioca balls in a slightly
sweetened water broth with a tad of condensed milk in
it.
Taro-filled pastries in the shape of cigars. Thin
pastry surrounding sticky sweet rich filling. Deep
fried. I love these things; could eat them all day.
Which means two things. One, they can't possibly have
any kind of redeeming social value; two, I am a couple
pounds bigger than I ought to be.
Fruit jelly. Made with agar-agar, so that it doesn't
weep or go gooey in the heat. Flavor was
inconsequential, sort of vanilla-citrus.
Red bean soup (hot or cold). I had the hot, which is
more authentic. Again, a thin sweet broth with red
beans in it.
Sweet longan congee. Hot sticky rice seasoned with
brown sugar and some dried longans (imagine a cross
between a dried apricot, a dried date, and a raisin).
Date: 29 Nov
Well, we found a place where we could pick up the
AirBus, which is a shuttle among the hotels and CKS
airport (in Taoyuan, an hour from Taipei). Price: an
incredible $3 per person (as opposed to the $45 for the
two of us that the cab ride in had taken). Got to the
airport pretty early, because I am kind of pessimistic
about public transport in congested foreign cities. Bb.
bet me a pork bun that the trip would take 45 or less,
and I bet her one that it would take 1 h 15 or more. It
took almost precisely 1 hr, so it was a wash. We
wandered around and did chores like changing money and
then tried to plead my case in changing my seat. I said
that 35A smelled bad, and could I have 32A or 33A
instead? Tap tap at the computer. No go. Oh, well.
Eventually (with Bb.'s fairly constant cajoling and a
supervisor's override code) we both got upgraded to
Connoisseur. I had 22H, an exit row window, and she
got 25H, a normal window. Not close together, but at
least in business class. And shortly before the flight,
the supervisor ran onto the plane: he got me a seat
upstairs in 19H. So Bb. got 22H, arguably the second
best downstairs business class seat, and I got arguably
the third best upstairs seat. Great flight, aside from
occasional turbulence over the north Pacific. I did a
bunch of work, watched bits of a show about the Three
Gorges Dam and bits of Runaway Bride, General's
Daughter, and the movie where Sean Connery plays a cat
burglar, I forget its name, and heard the Mozart 5th
violin concerto about 8 times. And continued to eat.
Dinner:
Spicy sauteed prawns with a squash slaw and tomato
caper relish. The prawns (3) were big, fresh, and
tasty, although a tad overcooked. The squash slaw was
excellent (and I hate yellow squash!), and the relish
was caponata. A salad of mixed greens was served with a
nice soy-sesame vinaigrette. Then I wondered whether to
choose the filet mignon with shallot Parmesan butter or
Martin Yan's kung pao chicken with steamed rice. I
decided to give Martin another chance. And it wasn't
bad, although it was about as kung pao as Bill Clinton.
It was in fact a decent 5-spice flavored mess of thigh
meat (a very southern dish) with peanuts and red hot
peppers; and the rice, although it had the usual
texture problems, was tasty. Fresh crisp sugar snap
peas and overcooked limp carrot batons. The guy next to
me had the steak: he cut into it. Juice ran out, and it
was steamy and bright pink in the middle. A look of
astonishment crossed his face. Next thing I knew, his
steak had disappeared, and the guy looked very happy
indeed. We both drank Bouchard's Saint-Veran, a
plumpish fruity Chardonnay with good terroir but just a
little too much residual sweetness: I imagine it went
better with my dish than his. He should have had the
Guigal Cotes du Rhone, or the Paul Thomas Merlot (my
notes say: "cooked, ok"), but who am I to tell my
neighbor what to do? Afterwards I compared notes with
Bb.: she too had decided to give Yan another chance
after initially ordering the steak. Funny, that.
Dessert was either a cheese plate (not for me) or what
the FA described as "creamy apple pie," which turned
out (I got the report later) to be an almond cake. I
had a glass of Sandeman Founder's Reserve instead,
followed by a couple Godiva chocolate creams (too
sweet).
They also had a snack tray, which included Kit Kat
bars, cookies, Godiva chocolates (too sweet), fruit,
and United Airlines brand Otsumami (rice crackers
again, with a nice picture of Mt. Fuji on the package).
Breakfast turned out to be unbelievably bad:
Mushroom onion omelette with tomato basil coulis
accompanied by smoked pork loin, roesti potatoes, fresh
fruit, and breakfast breads. The eggs were okay, but
the onions were raw, and the mushrooms were swimming in
a raw-flour sauce. The tomato stuff was weird, the pork
loin was (although not bad tasting) water-added, and
the potatoes were RAW! Fresh fruit wasn't very fresh
but still was better than what was being packed in the
US; and although my croissant looked as though someone
had scraped it off their shoe, it didn't taste bad,
strictly speaking. I drowned my sorrows in orange juice
(Tropicana). Soon the sun was shining and it was time
to deplane: with half an hour delay, we still managed
to cross the Pacific in 10 hours and 20 minutes. When
my granddad used to do the trip on Pan Am, it took
something like a week by plane or a month by boat. Went
to the mezzanine RCC at SFO, where all they had to eat
was a few artificial-vanilla flavored muffins. Bb. and
I sat and talked for a while, and then it was onward
and upward.
I'd originally had 15A on flight 142, but as we'd
gotten in early (and customs had taken another 30
seconds or so) I got 10A on flight 172 (2 1/2 hours
earlier). This is the weirdest seat I've ever sat in.
It's a window seat, but it's not by the window -
there's this little table or platform between it and
the side of the plane. As it's near the bathroom, there
isn't any room for another seat in the row, so it's by
itself. So it has as much stowage as 3 normal seats,
plus 2 telephones, 2 headsets, and 2 seat pockets. It
is also mighty isolated (10F and 11F on the other side
are similarly situated). Got to spend a bit of time
chatting with the FAs coming through, though. These
weird seats, btw, are Connoisseur in this
configuration; in another similar but even weirder
arrangement, they have put 4 coach seats in the room
taken by my seat, and numbered them 13 and 14 (though
they are ahead of row 11). Anyhow, I got myself cozy
with the New York Times (cursed when I found that the
crossword was the same as in the same day's
International Herald Tribune, which I'd done in Taipei
the day before (remember the Date Line)) and settled in
for another 6 hr of flying.
As usual, as soon as we reached cruising altitude, the
FAs did their thing, trying to make people as happy as
possible without removing any articles of clothing:
this then must involve two things, namely, booze and
food. I had a mimosa followed by a glass of Louis
Martini North Coast Cabernet, which I thought was
acceptable but a bit stemmy and green.
Well, now it's Jacques Pepin's turn to screw up at
United. We started off with a smoked magret that was
truly excellent, garnished with celery remoulade
(good), mandarin orange segments (good), watercress
(very spicy), radicchio (excellent), and a roasted
garlic vinaigrette (very good). Also there was a
spinach salad with mozzarella that was notable, the
leaves being blemish- free and fresh and clean, the
cheese little knobs of handmade cow's milk curd (also
good with the same vinaigrette). Really
restaurant-quality starters, and I was looking forward
to some nice stuff for the main course.
Alas, not all was perfect aboard this 767. The main
course, "Pork charcuterie enhanced by a white wine,
tomato and cornichon sauce, mashed turnips and
potatoes, sauteed bok choy with peppers and pearl
onions with raisins" turned out to be a lump of very
resilient pigmeat (not really a charcuterie, if you ask
my opinion) that was cooked to bright red rare and then
chilled and reheated but not recooked. It was as rare
as a steak. I ate it anyway. The mashed didn't have
either turnips or flavor. The sauce was pretty nice
(and distracted me from the rawness of the meat), and
the veggies were quite nice although out of place in
this meal. Again, dessert was a heavy dairy thing and
I didn't eat any. No Founder's Reserve on this flight;
just Amaretto and the like, so I just went back to
sleep; woke up an hour before touchdown and had just
time to go to the bathroom, pack up my junk, fix the
seat to conform, and get ready for landing.
Date: 29 Nov (aside)
They have a small but nice RCC in CKS: interesting, as
United has only one flight a day (and even more
interesting, when they announced the flight, not
everyone left). It's on mezzanine level, which means
that you get there not by the escalator, which passes
it by, but rather by the stairs (an odd little secret).
The appointments are pretty standard, and even with the
pretty Asian attendants you could be in LA or
someplace, until you get to the newspaper bin: China
Post, Asian Wall Street Journal, International Herald
Tribune, and so on.
The food corner (in the US, generally you get fruit and
juice, if you're lucky fruit and muffins, and if you're
very lucky fruit and cookies and muffins) has: a beer
and soft drink cooler. An open bar with Amaretto di
Saronno, Jack Daniel's, Johnny Walker Red, Dubonnet,
and other high-name-recognition liquor items. A
cookie-and-cake bar. A coffee bar. A bun warmer (such
as you see at the 7-Eleven stores all throughout Asia).
All in a space the size of my bathroom (I have a big
bathroom). I had a Tiger Beer from Singapore (a sort of
Heineken clone in a little squat 330 mL can), an iced
Oolong tea (dreadful, previously sweetened at the
factory), and a can of guava juice (ok). Also a slice
of prepackaged chocolate cake, most of whose label I
could not read, as it was in Chinese, but which came
from some food conglomerate in Germany: excruciatingly
sweet, not very flavorful.
Five paragraphs on beautiful buns.
The bun warmer is like a hot dog warmer but with 5
trays, each stocked with a different kind of bun,
identified by signs in Chinese and English. I first
tried the oddly named bacon bun, which had bacon in it.
If you don't know what Chinese buns are like, envision
a hamburger bun, only steamed (so it's pure white, the
only ingredients being white flour, sugar, yeast, and
water). Inside is a blob of 1 1/2 to 2 Tb of filling.
This one had smoked and fresh pork belly, diced up with
a garlic-soy gravy. Not bad at all.
The next was called "seafood bun" and consisted of
minced cuttlefish and possibly other kinds of fish and
shellfish mixed with large chunks of pork belly fat and
whole kernel corn in a slightly spicy and very greasy
red sauce. Not bad, either, if you're attuned to Asian
cooking, where fat is used as a luxurious contrast to
regular food.
The pork-bamboo shoot bao was just that, pretty
standard, and almost exactly like what you'd get for
US0.30 at the street vendor.
The best by far was described only with a Japanese
logo. It was sort of Asian-style chili con carne in a
bun: shredded meat, garlic, lots of hot chile pepper
(the other buns were heated by black pepper), finely
ground water chestnut, and other veggies. Good stuff.
Quite hot and spicy. Went back for more, and they'd
replaced them with regular pork buns. Sigh.
There were two kinds of sweet buns: red bean and
smashed lotus seed. I had one of the latter, and it was
pretty good, although there was not enough filling, and
they put cream in it! So of course I had a hard time
with that.
that I resurrected because it's somewhat germane to
Viking's query about Taipei:
Date: 23 Nov
First halting steps ...
I guess a prime piece of advice is: don't take a
breakfast flight. The food really stinks, for one
thing; no wonder they are opening food courts in all
the airports.
Took the land of nod special so I could have lots of
cushion for the Pacific flight at 2 - got to the
airport at 7 for an 8 am flight and was put directly
into my lovely 15A seat (lots of leg room, the first
row of coach). It turned out that that day they had
grossly undersold the flight, so one of the FAs
announced that anyone who wanted to sleep could stake
out a row of 3 middle seats (which of course I did).
Nice nap, 3 hr or so punctuated with breakfast, which
was either fruit and yogurt or the World's Worst
Parmesan quiche (texture of wet cake, no crust, very
strong off-cheese flavor) sided with the World's Worst
Fruit Cup (melon that could not be cut or even forked
up with the plastic utensils provided). And to top it
off, the ground support had forgotten to load headsets
onto the plane, so people watched the movie in silence
or not at all. Seatback Airmap didn't work (this is the
feature that I described this April - flight data and
computerized image to let you know where you are and
how fast you are going). One of the aft toilets didn't
work (I got it to work briefly, but I noticed late in
the flight when I went to stretch my legs that it was
beginning to overflow - and as the plane started the
steeper part of its descent, the raw sewage began to
drip down the aisle! I was glad I was 20 rows ahead.
Got in to SFO a little early and went to the domestic
airside RCC where I discovered to my chagrin the best
thing to eat was Ricola cough drops. So then I headed
to the international club, where there was fresh fruit
plus some of the most delicious rice crackers (deep
fried) I've ever had (of course, the Tokyo flight was
about to leave, so these all disappeared into the
pockets of the discerning). Bb. eventually met me
there, and soon it was time to emplane. We heard her
name called, and behold there was an operational for
her ... but not for me. Bless her heart, she
complained on my behalf, but they said they had
allocated upgrades based on last name. Advice from
the gate agent: "change your name to something
starting with A"! I sat in 35A, the first exit row in
coach, next to a pleasant Chinese guy named Jim. I
thought, what luck, I can get restaurant tips, but as
it turned out he hadn't been there since '91, I ended
up giving more information than he gave me. Dinner:
"Tangerine beef Szechuan Designed by international Chef
Martin Yan". I enjoy the guy on TV but do occasionally
point out that he's not that great a cook ... I don't
know how much to blame he is for this meal, which was
one of the most horrible I can recall. The beef (all
2.5 oz of it) was gristly and tough and overdone and
flabby all at the same time, and it came in an acrid
gelatinous sauce that may have met a tangerine in its
youth. The rice had hard bits and mushy bits and not
much in between. The veg was a fairly respectable
kimchee, though. They also served a shrimp salad, which
consisted of several tablespoons of moldy fishy tiny
shrimp and some wilted greens; I doused it with some
soy sauce (from a very cute little Kikkoman bottle that
came with, the same way MREs came with little Tabasco
bottles) but still couldn't eat it. Bb. reports that
she had Szechuan stir-fried shrimp with e-fu noodles:
the shrimp were good and fresh; the noodles were good,
not mushy; but the sauce (thanks again Martin Yan) was
disgusting, and luckily most of it was on the side of
the plate. Dessert was a fruit plate made up of rejects
from the breakfast fruit plate.
United 845 was a smooth but very lengthy (13 1/2 hrs)
flight, during which time I heard the Mozart 5th violin
concerto about 8 times. There was an open snack bar
nearby: little envelopes of snack mix, juices, water,
and lots of automat turkey sandwiches. I had just
water, thank you. As we climbed over the Aleutians, we
were served a bowl of chicken ramen (quite good) with a
half ounce of Tillamook Cheddar (aged at least 60
days). Not a good idea to serve milk products to a
plane full of Asians, and at this point one of the
great disadvantages of row 35 became apparent: people
congregated there waiting for the bathroom, and Jim and
I got more than our share of flatulence in the face.
Eventually I gave up and went back to sleep (what else
is new) and was woken up shortly before arrival with a
small plate of chicken rice. I think it was supposed to
be chi you fan, which is rice dressed with chicken fat
and with a few shreds or dice of chicken tossed on top;
it was instead chicken in brown sauce on hard-crusted
rice. Not too too bad, but not too too good, either.
But the Connoisseur class snack was apparently worse:
"baked potato and bacon chowder with garlic cheese
focaccia." I hear the focaccia was especially
egregious. We gained a bit of time on the flight, and
by scheduled arrival we'd already cleared ROC customs!
Then it was off to hire a taxi and many adventures, the
culinary of which I will chronicle here soon.
Date: 23 Nov
Street food is where it's at.
There are all kinds of shops and stalls, but the
selection is kind of limited.
There are the oyster pancake places (that's all they
serve). Just like hangtown fry, with a squirt of oyster
sauce on top. Last time I was in Taichung one made me
really sick, and I am sure I've never been the same
since. Avoided these places, even despite how wonderful
the food looked.
There are noodle places everywhere: basically, you get
a big mound of greasy brown noodles and get some
stir-fried stuff to go on top. I figure I can do as
well at home and without a language barrier, so we
passed on these. There are also noodles and stew
places: the stews are pretty standard, also things I
can cook: red-cooked eggs; red-cooked pork belly;
boiled bok choy or other cabbage; boiled pig
intestines; boiled pig liver; red-cooked spleen. Yumm.
In Taichung and Hualien in years past I found more
seafood at this type of place and did eat there; this
time, as it appeared to be pork parts season, we passed
them up as well.
As I have a high tolerance for grease, I was kind of
amused by the sausage stands.
You get a regular Chinese sausage, hsiang chang, for
US$1: they throw your chosen sausage into a vat of
boiling oil, and when it floats, it's ready.
They also have (prepared the same way) a sort of boudin
blanc, a big fat white rice sausage, for NT$20 (67c). I
had one; it tasted okay, but it's essentially plain
white rice and a bit of garlic (faintly perfumed with
five-spice or star anise as well) stuffed into a 4"
length of hog casing. The guy spears it on a stick,
rolls it in meat juice, and then you get to put hot
sauce on it, which is good.
The coolest thing is to have a white sausage cooked and
split in two like a bun, with a Chinese sausage stuck
in like a hot dog. Also slathered with hot sauce.
Most Chinese don't munch food in public, although
nobody stares at you or laughs if you do. I finessed
potential embarrassment by going out after dark
(bruised shins but not ego). When Bb. was hungry during
the day we found a secluded place in one of the many
parks and ate there (other people do this too).
Date: 23 Nov
I guess the street food of choice is the buns and dim
sum. These are not that much better than at good places
in the States, just more abundant. Also very cheap.
A sampling of what we had various places:
Bawdz (buns) -
Mushroom, cabbage, shiitake, glass noodle buns: tsai
bao (cai bo). Really nice, with good flavors and an
intriguing texture. These appear to sell out quickly.
Meat buns: rou bao. The closest thing to a burger: a
meatball made with scallions or vegetables and ground
pork with or without additional lard.
Garlic chive buns: jou tsai bao. All I can say is,
remember to buy one for each of your friends. A strong,
almost acrid garlic taste; not unpleasant, but mighty
assertive; sticks with you all day.
Shumai -
Regular ones: ground pork and vegetables in a wrapper,
steamed; some have shrimp and/or extra pork fat in
them. My favorite.
Yellow ones: slightly more delicate, but other than
that I can't see what the difference is.
Odd ones: as above, but the pork is mixed with frozen
mixed vegetables (corn, carrots, peas).
Miscellaneous -
Sharkfin dumplings: we had these two places. One of the
places had glass noodles to simulate shark fin; the
other didn't even bother. These are mostly pork and
shiitake ground up together in a biggish dumpling the
shape of a shark's fin. Pretty good, although I found
that on Taiwan they tended to be sweetened.
Meatballs: just big blobs of the filling from the
insides of the dumplings, seasoned with the ubiquitous
A-1 sauce (which has a common knockoff called Bulldog
sauce). Nothing special, but I can't see how one could
make them special.
Gelatinous things: I used to know their name, but I've
forgotten in my old age. A big square of rice dough
with pork, scallions, and A-1 and soy sauces in the
middle; steamed, or sometimes steamed and then
pan-seared. I like them a lot; I can see how westerners
might think they were a little peculiar.
Taro balls stuffed with meat: ground pork in hoisin
sauce wrapped in a ball of taro root and deep fried. I
like these a lot.
Sweet taro balls: As above, only the stuffing is red
bean paste and salted duck egg yolk. Heaven in the
mouth, take it from me.
Have I forgotten anything? Well, the sarsaparilla is
good (although I injured my hand again trying to open
the bottle), at 80 c for a half liter bottle.
Date: 23 Nov 99
A set meal at Hunan Garden, Lai Lai Sheraton. I thought
it pretty good (and not that bad a deal at $60 a person
all inclusive) even though there was nothing
particularly Hunanese about it, besides the fact that
there was lamb. I think it was more a child's
introduction to weird and expensive Oriental
delicacies, which was fine with me. Here in not exact
order is what we had, menu descriptions theirs.
Braised abalone in chicken broth. Excellent abalone,
fresh, a couple not too generous slices, sided with
pretty standard pork meatballs with a thinnish chicken
broth ladled over. Abalone tastes sort of like conch,
sort of like clams, etc. etc., only better. It is
grotesquely expensive, and I guess there's some
mythological or traditional-medical significance. This
was the first thing that came, and I think it was the
best (not that anything else was bad, mind you, just
that this set a standard few meals could live up to).
Chicken consomme with shark's fin. Shark fin too is
grossly expensive, which I find odd as sharks are
pretty common. It's not a particularly tasty item -
sort of gelatinous, slightly fishy, a little
reminiscent of undercooked rice noodles. This came as a
couple substantial hunks of the stuff in a very thick
but unsalted chicken broth. You're supposed to
subordinate everything to the taste of the shark fin, I
guess, but I added salt and pepper anyhow (even if this
horrified the help, they didn't let on). Shark fin is
supposed to promote vigor and long life, that sort of
stuff. Only time will tell.
Chicken consomme with bamboo pith. A thinner soup with
cloudlike blobs of faintly-flavored bamboo inside. Not
bad - but another sort of, you know, what's the point
type of dish.
Scallion pancakes (standard) accompanied the soupy
things.
Steamed spotted garoupa with scallion sauce. Excellent
firm fish (I'd have liked it a little less done,
though) steamed with ginger and scallion, the liquid
given up by the fish reduced to a rich sauce and
enriched with rice wine and a touch of soy. One of the
fish dishes of a lifetime. Garnish for both fish
dishes: steamed broccoli, excellent.
Steamed sea bream with cumin cordia. Quite similar to
the above, except that the fish was tender rather than
meaty (I thought it was sea bass), and there was a
touch of spice in the sauce - but I have no idea what a
cumin cordia is.
Braised sea cucumber stuffed with pork. More gelatinous
gooey iodiney stuff. But fresh (I've never had it fresh
before: it's only marginally better). Stuffed with
mince and in a sweetish thick soy-based sauce.
Steamed scallops with gourd. Dried scallops,
reconstituted, shredded; gourd I think is bitter melon.
This was a wet, strange dish, extremely fishy and
strong in flavor, but not bad for that.
Steamed lobster with garlic sauce. Half an Australian
bug steamed and with a very intense garlic-based sauce,
with a few garlic chives thrown on top. Quite a dish -
one of the few times I thought there was too much
garlic!
Braised chanterelle with oyster sauce. These weren't
chanterelles but rather some other kind of mushroom
that I am not familiar with. Mild mushroomy flavor went
well with a sweet oyster sauce. The texture of the
mushrooms was very peculiar: firm and spongelike in
parts, but what must have been the gills were cooked
until they separated in fiber-like strands.
Sauteed beef with pea sprouts. Pretty much what it
says, a bit of green pepper added for flavor. Pea
sprouts of course taste like greens and like peas at
the same time - one of my favorite vegetables.
Baked lamb chops. Actually I think pan-broiled,
medium-well (the Chinese tend not to do rare meat),
served with a thick sauce flavored with five-spice.
Good chops, rather gamy but very pleasant.
Fancy sweet soup. Red kidney beans in a slightly
sweetened starchy broth. A standard, but you have to
learn to like it (I did many years ago, but then I had
a head start).
Fancy dessert. A couple of silly little steamed buns
filled with lotus seed. Fancy indeed! You get them for
15c each at the street vendors!
Fresh seasonal fruit. These were kiwi, melon, grapes -
very standard, and I was slightly disappointed as I'd
seen several exotic fruits in the markets (mangosteens,
for example); but this was the Sheraton, after all. The
fruit had been lightly salted, which makes for a
strange (to Westerners) effect.
Kirin Ichiban beer. I can't tell you how much better
the Japanese version is than the stuff you get here in
the US (the latter is brewed at the Budweiser plant in
LA).
Date: 23 Nov
Buffet of traditional Taiwan foods at Tiffany's
restaurant at the Taipei Hilton.
Despite the restaurant's name, it was packed with
Chinese and Japanese families - all the white folks
were across the way at Dynasty, where you get normal
food. My friend Bb. was the only non-Asian there. This
is what we had all we could stuff ourselves with for
$15 a head counting tax and tip.
Meatball and melon soup. Pretty standard meatballs: the
Taiwanese like to mess with their meatballs so the
texture is both mushy and rubbery at the same time.
This may be sort of offputting to the noninitiated. The
standard combination is ham and melon soup, but I bet
this is cheaper. The melon, by the way, is the winter
melon (doong gwa, or a larger version of moqua), which
is sort of turniplike in flavor and not sweet at all. I
liked it okay.
Boiled vegetable in soup with shrimp dumpling. A kind
of bok choy, quickly blanched to order and dunked in a
light chicken broth. The shrimp dumpling turned out to
be coarse-chopped shrimp bound with a little egg white
and nothing else. You could also add other things to
your soup if you wished - minced fish, minced ham,
scallions, whatever.
Smoked shark. A pretty standard taste, but not salted
as most Western salt fishes are. Good firm fish cut so
that each piece had a thin line of gooey cartilage on
one side.
Steamed egg with fish. Almost exactly like the
scrambled egg dish I expounded upon about 5 years ago,
with lots of little embryonic fish. A pretty expensive
dish, as the fishies are hard to come by. The taste is
kind of unremarkable; you could almost duplicate it by
making scrambled eggs and stirring in a few teaspoons
of shredded rinsed chunk white tuna. As with a lot of
things, it's the rarity that is supposed to impress.
Cuttlefish with vegetables. Extremely tender cuttlefish
with various standard vegetables but mostly onions in a
brown soy- based sauce. Because of the onions, a little
sweet for my taste.
Salt roasted shrimp. Not very salty, but extremely
crunchy outside and meltingly tender and sweet inside,
as they had been cooked at a very high temperature.
Served whole (eyes, antennae and all) with shell. I ate
the shells but not the head (I find the guts sort of
bitter). Extraordinary shellfish flavor. Certain other
people, who shall remain nameless, refused to eat
anything that stared back from the plate.
Eel with young leeks. Stewed eel, mild but slimy, with
sauteed yellow garlic sprouts (not young leeks, as the
restaurant claimed). More soy sauce. I had two
helpings, one for me and one for my eel-o-phobic
friend Dave in absentia.
Seashell salad. Shredded carrot, bean threads, and some
unidentifiable long thin strips of seafood (looked like
the outside beard of a clam). Sesame oil dressing. Very
odd.
Fried crabs. Super excellent. Half crabs just sitting
there; you have to eat them with chopsticks, and as the
shells are on, it's a tough job - I ended up eating
most of the shells, and to heck with my digestion. No
sauce, no nothing, just plain fried crabs.
Squid balls. Minced squid formed into patties, seasoned
with A-1 sauce, coated in Panko, and deep fried. I
didn't get one, but I ate Bb.'s reject (she took one
bite and decided that it wasn't for her). I liked it
but not enough to go over and get one for myself (in
retrospect, I should have).
Roast goose. Really steamed goose rubbed with sweet
spices. Okay, a little gamy. As this was a free-range
Chinese bird, there wasn't much fat. As it was cut in
the Chinese style, there were little shards of bone all
over the place.
Chicken with basil. They said it was sauteed, but it
was really a standard red-cooked (i.e. stewed) bird
with a bit of basil flavoring. I had only one little
piece: I can make it better than that, after all.
Spicy braised beef tendon. Also called aromatic beef.
This is beef shin red-cooked with five-spice powder and
red chile, then molded into a loaf, chilled, and sliced
thin: sort of foot cheese, if you will. Great stuff,
one of the southern Chinese classics.
Pork with turnips. The least successful dish in the
room. Boiled pork with boiled turnips. That's it.
Many-flavored egg. Interesting. You start with
1000-year eggs, put them in a regular savory egg
custard, and top this with slices of salted duck egg.
Steam until firm. A really neat dish, and the slices
with their cross-sections of various kinds of egg
looked like modern art.
Steamed pork buns. Regular thing. Mince and scallions,
seasoned with soy, folded into bread dough and steamed.
Steamed spare ribs in black bean sauce. We didn't try
this: the ribs looked kind of forlorn.
Shumai. A little on the unsubtle side - wrappers a
little thick, meat a little too meaty. Not enough
seasoning or finesse, I guess.
Rice balls. Actually meatballs just like in the soup,
but steamed instead of boiled in the soup.
Turnip cake. A Chinese classic. Shredded turnip bound
in rice flour, steamed, sliced, pan-fried. A sprinkling
of minced ham tops it off. Interesting mixture of bland
and sudden BURSTS of flavor.
Guava slices. Soaked in salt water, and also unripe. So
more sour and salty than sweet.
Tomatoes. Which in China are eaten as a fruit.
Orange segments. Little yellow shrivelled oranges that
looked like not too fresh lemons. Sweet and tasty,
though.
Tapioca soup. Little tapioca balls in a slightly
sweetened water broth with a tad of condensed milk in
it.
Taro-filled pastries in the shape of cigars. Thin
pastry surrounding sticky sweet rich filling. Deep
fried. I love these things; could eat them all day.
Which means two things. One, they can't possibly have
any kind of redeeming social value; two, I am a couple
pounds bigger than I ought to be.
Fruit jelly. Made with agar-agar, so that it doesn't
weep or go gooey in the heat. Flavor was
inconsequential, sort of vanilla-citrus.
Red bean soup (hot or cold). I had the hot, which is
more authentic. Again, a thin sweet broth with red
beans in it.
Sweet longan congee. Hot sticky rice seasoned with
brown sugar and some dried longans (imagine a cross
between a dried apricot, a dried date, and a raisin).
Date: 29 Nov
Well, we found a place where we could pick up the
AirBus, which is a shuttle among the hotels and CKS
airport (in Taoyuan, an hour from Taipei). Price: an
incredible $3 per person (as opposed to the $45 for the
two of us that the cab ride in had taken). Got to the
airport pretty early, because I am kind of pessimistic
about public transport in congested foreign cities. Bb.
bet me a pork bun that the trip would take 45 or less,
and I bet her one that it would take 1 h 15 or more. It
took almost precisely 1 hr, so it was a wash. We
wandered around and did chores like changing money and
then tried to plead my case in changing my seat. I said
that 35A smelled bad, and could I have 32A or 33A
instead? Tap tap at the computer. No go. Oh, well.
Eventually (with Bb.'s fairly constant cajoling and a
supervisor's override code) we both got upgraded to
Connoisseur. I had 22H, an exit row window, and she
got 25H, a normal window. Not close together, but at
least in business class. And shortly before the flight,
the supervisor ran onto the plane: he got me a seat
upstairs in 19H. So Bb. got 22H, arguably the second
best downstairs business class seat, and I got arguably
the third best upstairs seat. Great flight, aside from
occasional turbulence over the north Pacific. I did a
bunch of work, watched bits of a show about the Three
Gorges Dam and bits of Runaway Bride, General's
Daughter, and the movie where Sean Connery plays a cat
burglar, I forget its name, and heard the Mozart 5th
violin concerto about 8 times. And continued to eat.
Dinner:
Spicy sauteed prawns with a squash slaw and tomato
caper relish. The prawns (3) were big, fresh, and
tasty, although a tad overcooked. The squash slaw was
excellent (and I hate yellow squash!), and the relish
was caponata. A salad of mixed greens was served with a
nice soy-sesame vinaigrette. Then I wondered whether to
choose the filet mignon with shallot Parmesan butter or
Martin Yan's kung pao chicken with steamed rice. I
decided to give Martin another chance. And it wasn't
bad, although it was about as kung pao as Bill Clinton.
It was in fact a decent 5-spice flavored mess of thigh
meat (a very southern dish) with peanuts and red hot
peppers; and the rice, although it had the usual
texture problems, was tasty. Fresh crisp sugar snap
peas and overcooked limp carrot batons. The guy next to
me had the steak: he cut into it. Juice ran out, and it
was steamy and bright pink in the middle. A look of
astonishment crossed his face. Next thing I knew, his
steak had disappeared, and the guy looked very happy
indeed. We both drank Bouchard's Saint-Veran, a
plumpish fruity Chardonnay with good terroir but just a
little too much residual sweetness: I imagine it went
better with my dish than his. He should have had the
Guigal Cotes du Rhone, or the Paul Thomas Merlot (my
notes say: "cooked, ok"), but who am I to tell my
neighbor what to do? Afterwards I compared notes with
Bb.: she too had decided to give Yan another chance
after initially ordering the steak. Funny, that.
Dessert was either a cheese plate (not for me) or what
the FA described as "creamy apple pie," which turned
out (I got the report later) to be an almond cake. I
had a glass of Sandeman Founder's Reserve instead,
followed by a couple Godiva chocolate creams (too
sweet).
They also had a snack tray, which included Kit Kat
bars, cookies, Godiva chocolates (too sweet), fruit,
and United Airlines brand Otsumami (rice crackers
again, with a nice picture of Mt. Fuji on the package).
Breakfast turned out to be unbelievably bad:
Mushroom onion omelette with tomato basil coulis
accompanied by smoked pork loin, roesti potatoes, fresh
fruit, and breakfast breads. The eggs were okay, but
the onions were raw, and the mushrooms were swimming in
a raw-flour sauce. The tomato stuff was weird, the pork
loin was (although not bad tasting) water-added, and
the potatoes were RAW! Fresh fruit wasn't very fresh
but still was better than what was being packed in the
US; and although my croissant looked as though someone
had scraped it off their shoe, it didn't taste bad,
strictly speaking. I drowned my sorrows in orange juice
(Tropicana). Soon the sun was shining and it was time
to deplane: with half an hour delay, we still managed
to cross the Pacific in 10 hours and 20 minutes. When
my granddad used to do the trip on Pan Am, it took
something like a week by plane or a month by boat. Went
to the mezzanine RCC at SFO, where all they had to eat
was a few artificial-vanilla flavored muffins. Bb. and
I sat and talked for a while, and then it was onward
and upward.
I'd originally had 15A on flight 142, but as we'd
gotten in early (and customs had taken another 30
seconds or so) I got 10A on flight 172 (2 1/2 hours
earlier). This is the weirdest seat I've ever sat in.
It's a window seat, but it's not by the window -
there's this little table or platform between it and
the side of the plane. As it's near the bathroom, there
isn't any room for another seat in the row, so it's by
itself. So it has as much stowage as 3 normal seats,
plus 2 telephones, 2 headsets, and 2 seat pockets. It
is also mighty isolated (10F and 11F on the other side
are similarly situated). Got to spend a bit of time
chatting with the FAs coming through, though. These
weird seats, btw, are Connoisseur in this
configuration; in another similar but even weirder
arrangement, they have put 4 coach seats in the room
taken by my seat, and numbered them 13 and 14 (though
they are ahead of row 11). Anyhow, I got myself cozy
with the New York Times (cursed when I found that the
crossword was the same as in the same day's
International Herald Tribune, which I'd done in Taipei
the day before (remember the Date Line)) and settled in
for another 6 hr of flying.
As usual, as soon as we reached cruising altitude, the
FAs did their thing, trying to make people as happy as
possible without removing any articles of clothing:
this then must involve two things, namely, booze and
food. I had a mimosa followed by a glass of Louis
Martini North Coast Cabernet, which I thought was
acceptable but a bit stemmy and green.
Well, now it's Jacques Pepin's turn to screw up at
United. We started off with a smoked magret that was
truly excellent, garnished with celery remoulade
(good), mandarin orange segments (good), watercress
(very spicy), radicchio (excellent), and a roasted
garlic vinaigrette (very good). Also there was a
spinach salad with mozzarella that was notable, the
leaves being blemish- free and fresh and clean, the
cheese little knobs of handmade cow's milk curd (also
good with the same vinaigrette). Really
restaurant-quality starters, and I was looking forward
to some nice stuff for the main course.
Alas, not all was perfect aboard this 767. The main
course, "Pork charcuterie enhanced by a white wine,
tomato and cornichon sauce, mashed turnips and
potatoes, sauteed bok choy with peppers and pearl
onions with raisins" turned out to be a lump of very
resilient pigmeat (not really a charcuterie, if you ask
my opinion) that was cooked to bright red rare and then
chilled and reheated but not recooked. It was as rare
as a steak. I ate it anyway. The mashed didn't have
either turnips or flavor. The sauce was pretty nice
(and distracted me from the rawness of the meat), and
the veggies were quite nice although out of place in
this meal. Again, dessert was a heavy dairy thing and
I didn't eat any. No Founder's Reserve on this flight;
just Amaretto and the like, so I just went back to
sleep; woke up an hour before touchdown and had just
time to go to the bathroom, pack up my junk, fix the
seat to conform, and get ready for landing.
Date: 29 Nov (aside)
They have a small but nice RCC in CKS: interesting, as
United has only one flight a day (and even more
interesting, when they announced the flight, not
everyone left). It's on mezzanine level, which means
that you get there not by the escalator, which passes
it by, but rather by the stairs (an odd little secret).
The appointments are pretty standard, and even with the
pretty Asian attendants you could be in LA or
someplace, until you get to the newspaper bin: China
Post, Asian Wall Street Journal, International Herald
Tribune, and so on.
The food corner (in the US, generally you get fruit and
juice, if you're lucky fruit and muffins, and if you're
very lucky fruit and cookies and muffins) has: a beer
and soft drink cooler. An open bar with Amaretto di
Saronno, Jack Daniel's, Johnny Walker Red, Dubonnet,
and other high-name-recognition liquor items. A
cookie-and-cake bar. A coffee bar. A bun warmer (such
as you see at the 7-Eleven stores all throughout Asia).
All in a space the size of my bathroom (I have a big
bathroom). I had a Tiger Beer from Singapore (a sort of
Heineken clone in a little squat 330 mL can), an iced
Oolong tea (dreadful, previously sweetened at the
factory), and a can of guava juice (ok). Also a slice
of prepackaged chocolate cake, most of whose label I
could not read, as it was in Chinese, but which came
from some food conglomerate in Germany: excruciatingly
sweet, not very flavorful.
Five paragraphs on beautiful buns.
The bun warmer is like a hot dog warmer but with 5
trays, each stocked with a different kind of bun,
identified by signs in Chinese and English. I first
tried the oddly named bacon bun, which had bacon in it.
If you don't know what Chinese buns are like, envision
a hamburger bun, only steamed (so it's pure white, the
only ingredients being white flour, sugar, yeast, and
water). Inside is a blob of 1 1/2 to 2 Tb of filling.
This one had smoked and fresh pork belly, diced up with
a garlic-soy gravy. Not bad at all.
The next was called "seafood bun" and consisted of
minced cuttlefish and possibly other kinds of fish and
shellfish mixed with large chunks of pork belly fat and
whole kernel corn in a slightly spicy and very greasy
red sauce. Not bad, either, if you're attuned to Asian
cooking, where fat is used as a luxurious contrast to
regular food.
The pork-bamboo shoot bao was just that, pretty
standard, and almost exactly like what you'd get for
US0.30 at the street vendor.
The best by far was described only with a Japanese
logo. It was sort of Asian-style chili con carne in a
bun: shredded meat, garlic, lots of hot chile pepper
(the other buns were heated by black pepper), finely
ground water chestnut, and other veggies. Good stuff.
Quite hot and spicy. Went back for more, and they'd
replaced them with regular pork buns. Sigh.
There were two kinds of sweet buns: red bean and
smashed lotus seed. I had one of the latter, and it was
pretty good, although there was not enough filling, and
they put cream in it! So of course I had a hard time
with that.