At The V:F, staff stay on top of the news. Freshly-printed signs at the wooden dining tables emphasize that ingredients here are safe: There’s no refined flour, no artificial flavorings, no domestic cooking oil. Most of the vegetables are organic, a server says.
The restaurant opened last year with a “City, Green, Hope” theme and a menu of over 60 western-style entrees, soups, salads and desserts, all vegetarian, some vegan.
Some of the dishes are quietly grand. The V:F does a great corn soup (NT$80) that arrives in a little white bowl. Though it doesn’t shout for attention, This soup tastes intensely of corn and is velvety and milkily fragrant in the way of light cream; every spoonful is brimming with dewy kernels. It is one of three soups based exclusively on vegetable stock and created from scratch daily using an immersion blender.
Photo: Enru Lin, Taipei Times
But soups aside, the vegetarian menu doesn’t try hard to make vegetables and fruits a main event. Its entrees include a mushroom risotto (NT$210), tomato and sesame pasta (NT$230), a cheese draped calzone (NT$250) — all dishes that are aimed at omnivores, just prepared without meat.
Consider the truffle pot-stickers (NT$210), a server’s recommendation. There are four to an order, fried to a greasy crisp on cast-iron just like its animal-product counterpart. The fried dough is the star attraction and it’s perfect — fragrant, chewy where it ought to be, better than the street-stand variety because you get them crunchy and lattice-thin at the edges. Next to them, there’s a kebob of red peppers and corn, a sort of lonely, virtuous vegetable symbol.
The V:F also offers a long list of drinks based on its imported teas and coffees. They have sweet names, like Strawberry Lola and Cocoa Jolie (NT$130), and are small and pretty drinks decorated with fruits. Blueberry Alice, an espresso drink, boasts a delicate sweet froth thick enough to hold up individual blueberries and dollops of blueberry jam. There’s also a range of popular juices, with equally darling names like Pretty in Pink and Green Grasshopper (NT$250), made with seltzer, fruit puree and crushed ice.
Photo: Enru Lin, Taipei Times
To mark its first anniversary, the restaurant will serve a complimentary dessert to diners who spend NT$300 or more from now until Friday. This dessert is a spiced and baked whole apple, cut in half to sandwich some vanilla ice cream, then sprinkled with chocolate cookie crumbs and topped with a sprig of mint. It looks odd on the table, like an overgrown potato, but the components come together like an apple cobbler.
Photo: Enru Lin, Taipei Times
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