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Restaurant: J-pop Cafe

By Vico Lee
STAFF REPORTER
Friday, Apr 02, 2004, Page 19

Music often steals the show at J-pop cafe, but its fusion cuisine is no less enjoyable. PHOTO: VICO LEE, TAIPEI TIMES

If you love J-pop stars like Chemistry, Glay and Hitomi to entertain you while having cheese sushi plates and sake cocktails, J-pop Cafe is the place to go. Taipei's high-schoolers, the main clientele of all things Japanese, have frequented the restaurant since it opened last spring to have french fries with apple sushi in front of its two cinema-sized screens showing the latest Japan-imported pop music videos.

Customers come into the two-floor restaurant through a counter that's more like a mini shop of J-pop paraphernalia -- videos of pop-idol drama series and cutesy trinkets and stuffed toys.

The restaurant is the first overseas franchise of Tokyo's J-pop Cafe, which has two branches in Shibuya and Odaiba. The swanky interior design comes from its Tokyo headquarters, while the cooks and staff are all trained in Japan. The music videos are imported every month from J-pop's Tokyo branches, so they can keep up to date and retain their appeal to fans of Japanese pop music.

J-pop Cafe's menu is amazingly long, full of interesting items in the vein of fusion cuisine. One recommended item is tuna sashimi with rice and avocado (NT$280). The tuna slices are briefly grilled to absorb the slightly spicy sauce while remaining raw inside. The dish is better served with the accompanying raw egg. The yolk sinks in the fresh avocado slices to give them a smooth, creamy taste while the cucumber dressing and a homemade sauce mingles well with the rice.

Japanese-style chicken nuggets (NT$280) use chicken leg. The chicken nuggets have a thin crispy crust of potato starch that is not at all greasy. The Thai-style sweet-and-sour sauce adds a fusion flavor here, but the best thing about the dish is the juiciness of the chicken.

After the high-schoolers have all headed home, J-pop Cafe turns into a wine bar targeting young female office workers, with a long list of brightly-colored fruity cocktails. One of the most popular cocktails, Yang Kuei-fei (NT$200), named after the legendary Tang dynasty beauty, is a beryl-colored mix of lychee chamomile liqueurs and grapefruit juice.
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