Far too often restaurants in Taipei try to do something different. They try to surprise you — if not with strange decor, then with experimental dishes like the fusion pork buns you can expect to find in cities like London or San Francisco.
But at Biteology, a modern European restaurant tucked away inside a residential alley and illuminated by a red neon sign, it’s all about creating simply prepared meat dishes complimented with complex, multi-ingredient sauces. It’s what food is supposed to taste like.
Biteology is part of the real food craze, which is one of the few Hollywood inventions I’m hoping will last. Not to be confused with the obsession with dietary restrictions, the real food movement is about eating food in its natural state.
Photo: Sherry Hsiao, Taipei Times
And while we’re counting bites, Biteology doesn’t offer you that many with its small portions. But what Biteology lacks in portions, it justifies with a religious observance to quality.
When I visited on a Tuesday, the intimate 24-seater only served four tables from 7pm to 10pm, including my own.
Our party was seated at a marble-topped table in front of a sound system. The red carpeting and brass details in an otherwise wood-dominant design, a foreign fragrance named the Fireplace, and a framed portrait of a young Woody Allen were exactly what I expected.
Photo: Sherry Hsiao, Taipei Times
The special that day was a squid dish (NT$320) soaked in ’Nduja sauce, served as a hot appetizer with crispy slices of toasted baguette (NT$90) available on the side. The sauce, made from a spicy Italian sausage, melts into a pool of oil and reminded me of the family-owned Italian restaurants in Boston’s North End, where the messier the plate the better the food tastes.
The cold-cut pork tenderloin and watercress salad with orange segments and peach mustard vinaigrette (NT$360) offered multiple layers of flavor — sweet, sour, bitter and even spicy.
I’ve had good natural wine, which is made with as minimal chemical and technological intervention as possible, but the light-bodied 2015 Burgundy from Vini Viti Vinci (NT$280 per glass; NT$1,800 per bottle) recommended by our server neither stole the show nor complemented the dinner.
Photo: Sherry Hsiao, Taipei Times
The duck breast (NT$480) was sandwiched between a thick eggplant-cocoa puree that brought out the bird’s gamey flavor and a sweet-and-sour black currant gravy that balanced it out for a lighter taste ideal for summer.
As someone who avoids all organ meat apart from the occasional Taiwanese street food late at night, I found the Wagyu beef tongue’s (NT$680) chewy and rubbery texture almost enjoyable on its own. Paired with thick strips of overwhelmingly sour pickled sweet peppers that were slimy and soggy and resembled raw forms of the meat, however, the dish remained virtually untouched for the rest of the night except by the bravest eater at my table.
My favorite main course was the lamb chops (NT$620), which were grilled to a tender texture with a perfect amount of black pepper that didn’t take away from the lamb’s natural flavors. The smear of creamy mustard green pesto was unnecessary but added another dimension to an otherwise simple dish with few ingredients.
For those looking for nostalgia and comfort, the pan-roasted Sasso chicken (NT$620) served on a Crate and Barrel plate I immediately recognized was roasted to a guilt-free perfection. Once dipped in the chicken drippings, the undercooked sauteed potato chunks on the side were forgivable, but the spongy shiitake mushroom quarters disrupted the dish’s overall texture and flavor.
Topped with mango sauce and cubes of mango that were delightfully crunchy, the semifreddo (NT$220) was quickly devoured.
Over the years, I’ve had everything from marbled chocolate cheesecakes with raspberry sauce to mint Oreo cheesecakes cooked up in college dorms, but the cheesecake (NT$200) at Biteology filled my craving for a creamy, no-frills New York cheesecake I’ve been looking for ever since a surprising encounter with one at a Starbucks in Japan. Biteology’s rendition had a salted caramel crust and just the slightest hint of lychee that I would not have noticed if the server hadn’t told me.
With only four main course options for dinner, Biteology doesn’t lend itself to frequent visits, which is why a quick scan of the restaurant’s social media accounts will show you that many people visit on anniversaries, birthdays or company-wide dinners. A short menu gets pretty boring pretty fast no matter how well the food is prepared.
But perhaps it’s with the same stubbornness of a Japanese omakase chef that Biteology has been able to attract a loyal following. In a city where diners are always chasing after the latest fad, you quickly realize it’s the places that focus on their food that survive.
Warning: Excessive consumption of alcohol can damage your health.
Crop damage from Typhoon Danas “had covered 9,822 hectares of farmland, more than 1.5 percent of Taiwan’s arable land, with an average loss rate of 30 percent, equivalent to 2,977 hectares of total crop failure,” this paper reported on Thursday last week. Costs were expected to exceed NT$1 billion. The disaster triggered clashes in the legislature last week between members of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and China-aligned lawmakers from the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). DPP caucus chief executive Rosalia Wu (吳思瑤) argued that opposition lawmakers should take responsibility for slashing the Ministry of Agriculture’s (MOA)
Asked to define sex, most people will say it means penetration and anything else is just “foreplay,” says Kate Moyle, a psychosexual and relationship therapist, and author of The Science of Sex. “This pedestals intercourse as ‘real sex’ and other sexual acts as something done before penetration rather than as deserving credit in their own right,” she says. Lesbian, bisexual and gay people tend to have a broader definition. Sex education historically revolved around reproduction (therefore penetration), which is just one of hundreds of reasons people have sex. If you think of penetration as the sex you “should” be having, you might
When life gives you trees, make paper. That was one of the first thoughts to cross my mind as I explored what’s now called Chung Hsing Cultural and Creative Park (中興文化創意園區, CHCCP) in Yilan County’s Wujie Township (五結). Northeast Taiwan boasts an abundance of forest resources. Yilan County is home to both Taipingshan National Forest Recreation Area (太平山國家森林遊樂區) — by far the largest reserve of its kind in the country — and Makauy Ecological Park (馬告生態園區, see “Towering trees and a tranquil lake” in the May 13, 2022 edition of this newspaper). So it was inevitable that industrial-scale paper making would
As the world has raced to understand how Taiwan can be both the world’s most important producer of semiconductors while also the pin in the grenade of World War III, a reasonable shelf of “Taiwan books” has been published in the last few years. Most describe Taiwan according to a power triangle dominated by the US and China. But what of the actual Taiwanese themselves? Who are they? And should they have any say in the matter? Chris Horton’s Ghost Nation: The Story of Taiwan and Its Struggle for Survival is perhaps the first general history of Taiwan to answer
RSS