3 Cafe was opened in August as an offshoot of Three Coins (大三元), a 40-year-old Cantonese restaurant. Located just off Zhongxiao East Road, 3 Cafe serves Hong Kong-style dim sum in a sparse but sleek and modern setting. The menu may be much shorter than the encyclopedic tomes associated with traditional dim sum restaurants, but nonetheless has a good selection of classic dishes. 3 Cafe is a convenient alternative to nearby establishments like Citystar 24HR HK Style Restaurant (京星港式飲茶), especially if you aren’t able to round up a big party of dining companions.
Dining by yourself? Try the dim sum combo (招牌蒸點組, NT$60), which is served in a cute bamboo box and contains three different dumplings. I got a pork shaomai (魚子蒸燒賣, available as a separate dish for NT$50) topped with a sprinkling of roe, a steamed shrimp dumpling (晶瑩鮮蝦餃, NT$70) and a steamed asparagus dumpling (碧綠蘆筍餃, NT$60), all of which were delicious, even if their wrappers were a bit dry around the edges. Also suffering from a touch of aridness was 3 Cafe’s pork balls with rice (米香珍珠丸, NT$55), or seasoned ground pork rolled in rice and steamed. The savory meat was tasty but the texture of the rice made it clear that the dish had been reheated before arriving at my table. The steamed rice roll with shrimp (鮮蝦靚腸粉, NT$60) was better and featured plenty of fat, juicy crustaceans. Other dim sum classics, like pan-fried radish cake (香煎蘿蔔糕, NT$40), rice wrapped in lotus leaf (干貝蓮香粽, NT$50) and steamed BBQ pork bun (菠蘿叉燒酥, NT$40) also tasted fresh.
3 Cafe serves a small selection of rice dishes and soup, including steamed rice with spare ribs (豉汁排骨飯, NT$80), which is big enough to be a meal on its own. The rice is covered in chunks of tender pork and three different types of sausage chopped into tiny pieces.
Photo: Catherine Shu, Taipei Times
The restaurant’s dessert menu is disappointingly small. My first choices, steamed egg custard bun (香蒸奶皇包, NT$40), and its cousin, deep fried egg custard bun (酥炸奶皇包, NT$40), were both sold out by 2pm on a recent weekday afternoon, so I ordered the excellent deep fried custard (黃金炸脆奶, NT$40) instead. The custard is wrapped in a thin pastry and fried so it resembles a golden egg roll.
Service at 3 Cafe is reasonably quick, if a little flighty. The restaurant was understaffed on a busy weekday evening; when I returned for a second visit in the afternoon, the waiters were distracted by a commercial that was being filmed in the back of the restaurant. My companion and I had to wait until the end of our meal for our drinks, even though we’d asked for them to be served with our food and flagged down three waiters. On the other hand, our check arrived quickly.
Photo: Catherine Shu, Taipei Times
Photo: Catherine Shu, Taipei Times
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