This Michelin-star award-wining Chinese restaurant serves tasty and refined food. One dish that stood out for me was their shark fin soup. It doesn’t contain stock e.g. chicken and ham – where it full of sodium nitrate preservative (I find it gives a unpleasant strong “iron” taste) – and corn starch. I find the delicacy taste to be light and natural with the subtle flavor of seafood from the shark fin. The Taiwanese don’t add vinegar or pepper to detract, enhance or “cover” its original flavor. I like it very much and after finishing it I don’t feel thirsty – due to them not using MSG. It is politically incorrect to eat shark fin but I’ll suffer it for now.
Landis Hotel also serves delectable international breakfast. I’ll highlight the notable ones that I have enjoyed. Their plain chai tow kuay is to die for. I have never tasted anything this good before ever. I felt like asking the cook there that morning who was scrambling eggs for customers to sir fry my chai tow kuay first before adding eggs, chai poh, spring onion and finally prawns into it with a dash of soya sauce…. Wah that will be the best chai tow kuay that I’ll ever taste in my life!
Coming back to the other dishes (sorry I got carried away there for a moment) their smoked salmon is the best I have ever tried. It is not fishy or salty and the slices are thick…. I can’t remember how many slices I have tucked away…I am still drooling just thinking about it. Their bacon slices are fried right, not like a dried piece of cracker. It is juicy, not salty and surprisingly quite chewy. Then again I didn’t taste a lot of sodium nitrate in it too and that is a rarity these days.
I ate the fried pork chop bento and braised pork chop bento (last pic), from a franchise in Taoyuan, in order to compare the two. I like both of them and I think they tasted good – the pork is tender and juicy inside while their fried outside were flavorful. The cooked fresh bamboo shoots were nice. I don’t care for the preserve ones because it smells/tastes like dung to me. They also use Taiwanese rice which is sticky, fragrant and fluffy – like those used in sushi – I like it over fragrant Thai rice.Unfortunately I’ve never tried the original ones before it became a franchise so I can’t really tell if they are as good as the original. Nonetheless the franchise chain is pulling in the crowd. I wished the pork chops were crispier; then again I ought to have eaten them immediately instead of bringing them home to savor them. While on the way home, the smell of these two bento had me salivating in the car.
