Any meal at Just Rabbit includes a series of surprises and images, all upbeat. The walls are painted with fun cartoons and pop music plays loud while videos are projected onto a brick wall. The adjacent clothing store sells the latest Japanese imports and combines with the eatery to make Asrabbit, a concept food-and-clothes complex with branches in Tokyo and in Ximending on Wuchang Street.
Just Rabbit's menu changes every day and switches in no discernible pattern between buffets of American food and Japanese food.
When I showed up with a friend for lunch, the chalk-drawn menu listed US foods in Chinese, and all we had to do was sit down, choose a beverage from the extensive Chinese and English drinks menu, and wait for the buffet to come to us.
The waiters immediately brought our drinks and began to serve the all-you-can-eat meal. They walked around the restaurant with foods of the day and happily refilled any plate or drink at our beck and call, though not all drinks have free refills, so be sure to ask.
We got salad first. It was just iceberg lettuce with strips of carrot and purple cabbage, but the dressing of oil and vinegar livened up with wasabi was delicious and made the otherwise plain salad worth a second helping.
Pizza was next, and my friend and I each took one small slice of the thin-crust pie with real tomato sauce (a plus), pineapple and shrimp (nice combination) covered in what tasted like cheap cheese (a minus).
The food kept coming, one kind after another: a small but deliciously flaky and buttery croissant with egg salad inside; a big basket of fried drumsticks, wings, and fries; spaghetti with pesto, oil and crab meat; and barbecue chicken, which was the best item we got.
The chicken was tender and juicy and coated in a sweet sauce that had unexpected jolts of spiciness. The fried chicken in the basket, though, was a spicy attempt at US bar-style wings, but the meat was covered in the usual Taiwanese fried chicken batter. The fries were good.
We were served bite-sized cubes of cake at the end of the greasy feast. The yellow cake was the best, while the green cake tasted like seaweed and was not good.
I'll have to go back to check out the Japanese fare, but one of the waiters told me they served sushi, Japanese curry and other foods you'd expect, but done with a Taiwanese twist that, she promised, would made it interesting.
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