Taiwan Restaurant

San Francisco, CA

Everybody has childhood favorites and Taiwan restaurant is that place for Chu-Toro. She's been coming here with her family ever since she was a young girl and started sharing the tradition with me six years ago. Ever since, I've been hooked as well. It's just so nostalgic and classic, that it's pretty hard to curb the craving until we make a special trip to Clement. Sure, it's super oily and fattening, but would you want your Chinese breakfast any other way? In a huge wok filled of oil in the front window, you can watch them fry up Chinese donuts fresh on the weekends. Our order is always the same, and although we've had other lunchtime menu items, we come here for breakfast.

Soy Milk and Chinese donut

The soy milk is usually made fresh, but during this visit, they've done something recently that tasted kinda powdery. That's a shame because it's usually perfect. The Chinese donut is also usually made fresh and dripping with oil when it's served, but this one must have been sitting at the window, because it was cold. Pretty unfortunate that the first time I had my camera, the meal wasn't perfect. Still better than anything we could get in our neck of the woods, so we enjoyed it nonetheless.

Potstickers

We never order potstickers, unless we're here. You can see the great pan fry they do on only one side of the large perfect dumpling. It was awesome.

Green Onion Pancake

The green onion pancake, perhaps the oiliest of them all, is a crunchy dough with green onion bits on the inside. A classic and perfect Chinese breakfast dish.

Beef noodle soup

This one's not oily, but is still very fatty. Not just from the meat which comes laced with tendon and fat, but from the msg in the broth. Chu-Toro mentions she thinks the noodles recently changed, not as chewy which she dislikes, but this is our favorite soup noodle dish and always warms our soul. 

Food is really about the memories it invokes, and despite its recent drop off, it remains one of our go to spots in the city for breakfast. 

12/12/2010

Rating 7/10