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.
 |
| Chef Andy |
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.
 |
| Beef Tongue Risotto |
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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