Tuesday night was a great night to go to La Condesa to celebrate wifey’s birthday. There was absolutely no wait, which is probably unusual for this restaurant du jour.
With its super-glossy, turqoise-wood-and-steel interior that looks like it was done by “Flipping Out” star Jeff Lewis, La Condesa is the most luxuriously appointed restaurant space in Austin. The proof is in the at-times sublime level of the food, and of course the prices.
I’ll start with the second-best thing about La Condesa: the drinks. They have the most creative tequila-based drink list I’ve ever seen. All of them involve high-quality tequila, some kind of citrus for acid, and some kind of weird (in a good way) combination of herbal/floral/fruit accents to set the drink apart from your standard margarita.
I had the El Cubico: whole leaf tobacco-infused Hornitos, navan vanilla liqueur, lemon, grilled pineapple juice, mezcal essence, volcanic saffron-infused salt rim. It sounds like something Dos Equis spokesman “The Most Interesting Man in the World” would drink, and I think I did feel myself growing a salt-and-pepper beard as I drank it. I’m not sure if it was necessary to fly to a volcano to get the saffron, as I couldn’t taste it at all, but the strong butter, char, pineapple, and vanilla flavors were enough to make this one of the best tequila drinks I’ve had in many a moon.
The Spicy Paloma was also delicious: herradura blanco, fresh grapefruit-ginger juice, piloncillo (Mexican dark brown sugar), splash of jarritos de toronja (grapefruit soda). The ginger at the end gives it a kind of velvety, mysterious incense-smoke finish.
The best thing about La Condesa by far is the trout ceviche (Trucha con Aji Amarillo, $14) .
You can’t tell from this picture, but this dish explodes with more flavor per inch than just about anything in Austin, Uchi included. The ingredient list is, like the drinks, exotic: ocean trout, tomatillo salpicon, aji amarillo (sweet yellow chili) sorbet, hoja santa (a Mexican herb), and dried lemon slices. The raw trout (really, it’s sashimi, not ceviche) is perfectly fresh, and sliced thin to melt in your mouth. The most important ingredient of the dish though is actually the dried lemon slices. The complex, concentrated combination of bitter and sour is much more interesting than simple fresh lemon, and I wonder why I don’t see it more often. The acid of the tomatillo and the gentle spiciness of the sorbet add additional layers of flavor. It may seem ridiculous to pay $18 for a few small slices of fish, but trust me–everyone should make the pilgrimage to La Condesa just to try this dish.
Unfortunately, once you have the trout and the drinks, there isn’t much else worth trying. The one exception is the fantastic guacamole, which comes in three flavors. We had the crab and green apple ($8), and the chipotle and toasted almond ($6).
You wouldn’t think that crab and apple would work with avocado, but actually, the sweetness of the apples substitutes for the traditional tomato, and the mild crab meat is nicely complemented by the buttery avocado.
Not pictured here are porkbelly, apples, and goat cheese on thick corn tortillas ($16), hamachi ceviche ($14), and for dessert, goat cheese cheesecake with pineapple, and cafe caramel pot de creme with coca nib shortbread and cinnamon crema. These dishes all sound incredibly exotic and mouthwatering on paper, and they were certainly good, but for these prices, it’s fair to ask for sublime.
Despite the unevenness of the menu, you need to visit La Condesa. I’d recommend coming during happy hour when the weather’s nice, so that you can sit on their patio and people-watch while you enjoy some delicious food and drink, without having to take a dinner-sized hit in the wallet.
Shrimp noodle rolls are a dead-simple dish, so they’re all about freshness. There are 3 things I look for: thick, soft, but not mushy skin; big, plump shrimp; and sweet sauce. These had all three. And I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed that in the States, the shrimp dishes at some Dim Sum places have a faint taste of stagnant water? I don’t know where that comes from, but there was none of that here.
These were huge, moist, spongy, and full of cilantro. And surprisingly, they were also filled with fragrant orange peel, instead of the usual ginger. Even my wife had never seen that before, so it must be a recent innovation. After 2000+ years, I thought it was impossible to improve on the beef ball, but I was wrong.
hot, fluffy cha shao bao (barbecue pork buns) filled with perfect bbq pork–full of plum flavor but not too sweet, chunky and full of fatty pork goodness,
shrimp, cilantro, and ginger dumplings,
plain old shrimp dumplings (ha gao), a Dim Sum staple,
spare ribs (pai goo) in chili and garlic black bean sauce, full of malty, not-too-salty black bean flavor,
and super-fresh daikon cake, or luo bo gao.
The best thing about Taiwanese Dim Sum is that you order off a menu, not from a cart like in the States, so you are guaranteed to get what you want, when you want it. We were in and out in 30 minutes. What more could you want in life?
bai chen, a delicious, simple salad of dried, hard tofu, cabbage, red chili, green onion, sugar, and vinegar,
a stunningly fresh dish of shelled peas with shredded chicken in white sauce (reportedly their most popular dish, even more popular than the duck),
super-thick green onion cakes, or cong you bing,
crab soup with cabbage (drab-looking, but tasty),
sea slug soup with puffed rice clusters (an interesting mix of crunchy rice clusters and squishy sea slug, which didn’t have much taste but was reminiscent of a fishy mushroom),
and shrimp on a bed of greens.
All of this was good, but we were all waiting for the duck. Finally, it arrived–in pieces.
What was really unique and interesting about this version of Beijing duck (kao ya) was that at first, they only gave us the skin!
The salty, fatty, bacon-crisp skin played beautifully off of the sweet plum sauce.
As the Chinese love to eat all parts of an animal and are loath to waste anything, they also made a soup out of the rest of the duck. But it was a bit too gamy for my American palate.
We finished off the meal with a couple of tasty desserts. I love Chinese desserts because they’re always light, like this almond gelatin (xing ren dofu),
or these lightly sweetened fried red bean pancakes coated with toasted sesame seeds. They don’t leave you feeling weighed down.
The big news on day 6 was that I had the best sashimi I’ve ever had in my life. And the biggest pieces of maguro and albacore that I’ve ever seen.
But it’s the best moo goo gai pan you’ve ever had. The sauce is thinner than the goopy stuff you get in America, yet richer in taste, full of broth. And the melon is an incredible counterpoint to the lean pork: juicy and full of verdant coolness.
It was unbelievable–the tofu as soft as a melted marhmallow, the bonito as smoky and flavorful as bacon, not fishy at all.
Then there was this salad, with giant pieces of bamboo, smoked shark, onion, tomato, red bell pepper, and 2 kinds of seaweed, in a light vinaigrette.
You haven’t had bamboo till you’ve had it fresh–it has a young, plaintive taste, not the sharp tang of the canned stuff.
Obviously, seafood is their specialty, and the seafood was indeed special: huge tuna hand rolls (on the house!),
grilled wild-caught abalone,
steamed anh diao (red lion fish) with green onion, carrot, and ginger,
the requisite clams san bei,
a delicious mottled pink crab I’d never seen,
What was most amazing about it was that I don’t like kimchi. It usually has a harsh, chemical flavor, like salted lye soap. But this kimchi was different–sweet and sour, not astringent or salty. And the cabbage was still crunchy, not wilted and soggy like it usually is. I didn’t even know that the Taiwanese did kimchi!
The flavorful, toothsome skin was beautifully caramelized with a honey and sesame glaze, which kept all the moisture in the pink, tender meat. It went surprisingly well with a squirt of lime, which brightened the deep flavor of the blood-rich leg meat.
Continuing the old-school theme from the previous day’s visit to the 
They’re just like most dumplings though in that they consist of an egg noodle shell filled with meat. We dipped these in a spicy red chili sauce that was a little sweet, with a little bit of soy. The sauce was great, and the bao tse filling was satisfying, if lacking in any particular character.
The pork was boiled–not my favorite preparation, as it tends toward blandness–but the broth was very flavorful, and I always like daikon. The sauce to dip the pork in, though, was too simple—just plain soy sauce and raw red chili, a bit harsh. The meat tasted better when dipped in the sweet bao tse sauce.
We left the temple market and went to a place in the same area (Yen Ping N Road, Section 2) specializing in squid cakes and fish balls. Squid cakes are made the same way as fish balls and all 
The rice and its filling was ok, but the real story was the smoked salmon. It had been glazed on the outside with some kind of delicious lemon and brown sugar mixture, and so the outside edge of every slice lended a sweet-and-sour note to the smokiness of the meat. The meat itself was perfect—thick enough not to fall apart, as smoked salmon does sometimes, and firm, never mushy.
The star of this dish was this big-eyed red fish, some sort of scad, which had just been killed seconds ago and whose head was presented for decoration. The meat was served in delicious skin-on chunks. It was very clean in taste, sort of like a tuna, but a little sweeter, and lighter in texture. Another interesting note: see the key limes at the bottom of the picture? The Taiwanese often serve sashimi with lime or lemon, and it’s delicious. It’s such an obvious accompaniment, I wonder why you don’t see that in the States. Is it Japanese purism?
Considering how subtle in flavor (and expensive) abalone is, I don’t understand why you would want to drown it in sugary pineapple (especially Taiwanese pineapple, which is even sweeter than Hawaiian) and suffocate it in a blanket of chewy, tasteless cheese. The Taiwanese view Western food as fancy, particularly cheese for some reason. But we learned last night that 
Day 4 began with a pilgrimage to holy ground: a little shrimp roll store on Alley 60 off of of Yenping North Road, Section 2. It’s in the “old town” area of Taipei, near the apartment, now demolished, where my father-in-law grew up. Like many of the great eateries in Taipei, it has no sign, it doesn’t even have a name, but it’s so famous that if you don’t get there by 11, they’ll be out of product. The place is literally a hole in the wall.
Everything is so blackened with soot and God knows what else, you don’t want to touch anything. But the grime only makes the clean, pure perfection of their shrimp rolls seem even more miraculous.
The shrimp roll, or shia juen, like all Chinese street food, is a beautiful simplicity. It’s nothing but shrimp paste, chunks of shrimp, and diced water chestnut rolled up in “tofu skin,” or thin sheets of bean curd, and deep fried. They’re served on a plate with soy paste and spicy mustard for dipping. It never ceases to amaze me, the complexity that can arise from the play between the crisp, sweet starch of the water chestnut, the plump, juicy shrimp, the crisp tofu skin, the oil, and the earthy heat of the mustard. It’s one of those foods that is a living embodiment of Occam’s Razor. Surely someone up there likes us if he allows something so simple to taste so good, for only a couple of bucks.
This place also serves another kind of roll called chi juen, which literally means “chicken rolls” in Mandarin. But they don’t have any chicken in them. Chi juen is actually a mistranslation from the Taiwanese term for these rolls, gey gun. Gun means “rolls,” like the Mandarin juen, but gey can mean either “fried leftovers” or “chicken.” Whoever translated the Taiwanese into Mandarin thought that the intended usage was “chicken,” but they were wrong. So they are really “fried leftover rolls.”
The milk tea I had was actually very good—perfectly sweetened, that is, not too much, and topped with satiny foamed milk, which I had never seen before. So if you’re in the area, you’re thirsty, and you don’t mind paying a premium, “Ours” is a good call. For drinks.
I didn’t order it, so it wasn’t all my fault. But I did convince myself that it was OK to eat cheese in Taiwan, which was a fatal mistake. The nachos were stale bagged chips topped with some kind of rubbery white “cheese.” Admittedly, I’m from Austin, Texas, nacho capital of the world, so maybe I’m spoiled. But I can’t imagine anyone liking these triangles of blech. The cheese sticks were serviceable but also obviously from a box, and the “fries” were neither made of potatoes nor fried—they had the consistency of damp, stale breadsticks. More troubling was that they tasted vaguely of shrimp, and I’m not sure that was intentional. The worst part of this dinner debacle was that it cost $18. I could have had 3 plates of sashimi for that price!!
Lunch was at a wun tun (wonton) street stall. Since it was hot outside, we had them “dry” instead of “wet” (in soup). Wun tun literally means “swallowing clouds,” and you can tell why when you look at a real Chinese wun tun, which, unlike their small, thick-skinned American cousins, is so full of crinolatons and creases that it does look like a big, vague cloud. They really are big too—impossible to eat in one bite. These were combo wun tun, filled with chunks of shrimp, shrimp paste (the shrimp form of 
Taiwan is known for its world-class fruit, thanks to a hothouse climate and heavy government investment. The grapes, as you can see, were huge. They were filled with sweet juice, without the thick chewy skin or bitter tannin flavor you often get with big purple grapes. They weren’t seedless, unfortunately, but I was willing to swallow the seed to get at the delicious flesh.
But this ain’t your mama’s meatball. The Chinese variety is lighter and spongier, because rather than being simply ground, the meat is minced into a paste and mixed with water. The downside of this technique is that the meatball loses the natural meaty, burger-y texture and density of a western meatball. The upside is that it gains a whole new, artificial, yes, but otherworldly texture–firm at first, then yielding, smooth, light, and uniform throughout.
The sausage we had is called xiang chang. It’s a Taiwanese specialty–roasted fresh, not dried like similar sausages in Hong Kong and China. It’s thick, full of sexy pork fat, and like most Chinese sausage, quite sweet (supposedly xiang chiang is the sweetest). We ate it sliced over rice (which soaked up the grease–doubling the pleasure) along with some water spinach stir-fried with garlic, a very common vegetable dish in Taiwan. Water spinach is similar to young western spinach: lighter in flavor, with smaller leaves and tenderer stems.
A meal at a night market, or yeh shih, is essential to the Taiwanese experience. You can do it all at a night market–buy cheap knockoff fashions, get a new TV, consult a fortune teller, play carnival games, and of course, eat every kind of Taiwanese street food imaginable. And they’re not just kitschy tourist attractions. For the locals, they’re the equivalent of the plaza in Europe or the mall in suburban America: not only a site of commerce, but a public commons, especially for young people. I speculate that half of all young Taiwanese love affairs begin and end at a night market, and for good reason. You can entertain your girl for a fistful of change, and if she just dumped you over dumplings, you can console yourself with congee.
First stop was one of my favorite stalls in Taipei: a place known for its fried pork soup, or pai goo tan. The finger-shaped pieces of fried pork chop, or pai goo, are prepared in basically the same way as 
Along with the soup we had cubes of fried tofu, or zha dofu. With Chinese-style fried tofu, simplicity is key: cubes of the stuff in a pool of a simple soy-based dipping sauce. The simple presentation allows the pure taste of the tofu to take center stage. Sounds bland, but you haven’t had tofu until you’ve had it fresh–it’s totally unlike the supermarket stuff. None of that canned, bland, tofu-water taste, just milky, silky, wholesome soybean.
The night could have satisfactorily ended there, but my father-in-law wanted to show me a new fresh seafood stall he’d discovered. I wanted to be a good son-in-law, so I complied. As you can see here, the deal with these stalls is you pick from among the day’s just-caught fish and shellfish, then it’s prepared the way you want it and brought to your table.
The first dish was clams san bei style, which is one of the signature dishes of Taiwan (although originally the san bei techinique was from southern China). San means three, bei means cups. The ”three cups” are the three main ingredients of the sauce: soy sauce, a mildly sweet rice wine called san jiu, and sesame oil. These provide the flavor base, but it’s really the added ingredients–garlic, chilies, ginger, and basil–that create the instantly recognizable taste of san bei. The basil, I think, is especially key–it’s got a strong, wild, licorice taste, sort of like Thai basil. It counteracts the fishiness of the clams beautifully. The clams at this place were very good–sweet, tender, and big–but I prefer Taiwanese river clams, as they’re smaller but sweeter. Maybe we’ll get a chance to have some later on.
Next course was a plate of sashimi, one of many signs of Taiwan’s heavy Japanese influence–it was a Japanese colony from 1895 until the end of WWII. Perhaps it seems dangerous to eat sashimi from a street stall, which, to put it charitably, aren’t sterilized. But the fish is so fresh in Taiwan that it makes no difference, and the competition is so stiff here that anybody trying to cut corners will be punished swiftly. The presentation at a street stall is crude at best—though this place arranged our platter pretty nicely, often it’s basically just piled onto a plate with minimal garnish, and sometimes the vendor, in his eager haste to process your order, neglects to cut the sashimi all the way through, so the slices are all stuck together at the bottom like a big meaty fan–but it beats the average American sushi restaurant in freshness, espcially in a landlocked place like Austin, where I live. Plus it’s dirt cheap–this plate was about 5 bucks, and it would probably go for $20 in the US. This plate had the standard stuff–yellowtail, albacore, salmon (my fave–sweet and silky), and mackerel, all of it delicious. The only thing I could say against this sashimi was that it was a tiny bit frozen, partiularly the tuna. Not the worst thing in the world, but a sashimi purist (which I am not) would be offended.
The shrimp sashimi was memorable because I’d never had it before. Like the fish sashimi, the shrimp was impeccably fresh, and served unadorned in the shell. We peeled them by hand, then dipped them in soy sauce and wasabi, the standard sashimi condiment. They were sweet and delicious, but my in-laws wanted to stuff me, so I ended up eating almost the whole plate. After a few of them, the softness of the uncooked shrimp started to unnerve my inner American, who expects shrimp to be chewy. But this is looking a gift horse in the mouth.
The shell of the local crab, as you can see, had a strange shape, but it tasted just like any crab. It was beautifully simple, steamed and eaten without any condiments or seasonings.
The fried fish topped with sauteed greens was a similarly simple pleasure–the Taiwanese almost always eat fish whole, picking out the flesh with their chopsticks. This fish had a mild, flaky white meat, and the standard condiment of salt and white pepper was all it needed. The monkfish san bei was good, but it was the last thing I tried, and by then I was stuffed, so I couldn’t really taste it.
Besides the shrimp, the most interesting thing we had was this wild vegetable called jeh lei in Mandarin. The term is not very descriptive, as it just means something like “vegetable,” and it can apply to any number of wild vegetables. It’s some kind of weed that grows around trees. I’d never seen anything like it before, so it’s possible that it’s only available here, but then again, I’m no botanist, so I can’t be sure. It’s hard to tell from the picture, but the end of each stem is curled with leaves like a harlequin’s shoes.
The first few Taiwan posts (or maybe all of them) are going to be backdated, because I’m behind.
I’d been fantasizing about chi pai because there’s just something special about it. The Taiwanese have managed to make a hunk of fried meat, one of the most primitive satisfactions in the universe, into something ineffable. I am a big fan of Southern fried chicken, but make mine chi pai every time.
Chi pai joints will usually also serve other fried foodstuffs. This time I got these fried rice-and-daikon cakes, shown here in cross-section, as a side. The contrast between the crisp shell and the soft, almost gelatinous cake inside is one of the signature pleasures of Chinese food, and the clean, mild sweetness of the daikon was a nice follow-up to the heavy, fatty flavor of the chicken. As a bonus, there was a nice little piece of pork in the center of the cake, like a little gift, a little twinge of savory to round out the flavor profile. (Using shreds of meat as a flavoring, rather than as the main attraction, is another common technique in Chinese food–as you’ll see.)
prseshad
