"What makes a restaurant is more than just food. It's service," said Dai Zi-yan (
The place is clean and the staff are friendly without being intrusive. The decor is changed regularly. It seems that every consideration has been taken to ensure that the diners are able to make themselves at home. The subtlety of good service is guaranteed by Dai's nine years of serving in various cafes and restaurants before setting out on his own. "My extensive experience in various restaurants has taught me what customers really want," Dai said.
Dai combined his own predilection for western food with recipes from his mother, who was raised in Indonesia, and father, who came from Zhejiang Province, to create a menu that's truly global. But it's in Southeast Asian cuisine that Tian-mu excels.
PHOTO: DAVID VAN DER VEEN, TAIPEI TIMES
Capsicum chicken (NT$300), a common Thai dish, is made with a twist. Instead of chicken breast in the original version, chunks of chicken leg meat are fried to a tender yet chewy texture with a crispy skin. A homemade sauce is added before the dish is topped with shredded cucumber and a generous amount of parsley, creating a refreshing taste. Like many other items on Tian-mu's menu, this dish's spiciness has been toned down to adapt to local palates. But the kitchen will happily oblige diners with stronger taste buds -- just tell your waiter.
Similarly, the originally spicy badong beef (NT$300) is made much less so. The choice tendon is first boiled and then stewed for hours until it tastes as tender as sirloin. Like many of the ingredients at the restaurant, the sauce was brought back by Dai's mother on one of her frequent trips to Indonesia.
Crab and tofu pot (NT$350) is a quintessential Zhejiang dish and Tian-mu makes it look as appetizing as possible. Specks of carrot are sprinkled on the thick yolk-color soup. The amazing thing is that, despite stewing in the same pot, each of the ingredients retains its own flavor, especially the big shrimps, the thin slices of bacon and the tofu.
You couldn't do much better than order the chicken-and-rice casserole (NT$200) to accompany these dishes -- if you can get it. The supply is limited to less than 10 servings per day in order to maintain its quality. Rice is cooked for over an hour with chunks of chicken leg and mushrooms to infuse it with the chicken's flavor.
It is barely 10am and the queue outside Onigiri Bongo already stretches around the block. Some of the 30 or so early-bird diners sit on stools, sipping green tea and poring over laminated menus. Further back it is standing-room only. “It’s always like this,” says Yumiko Ukon, who has run this modest rice ball shop and restaurant in the Otsuka neighbourhood of Tokyo for almost half a century. “But we never run out of rice,” she adds, seated in her office near a wall clock in the shape of a rice ball with a bite taken out. Bongo, opened in 1960 by
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