CLOSED/revisited/korean: I recommend HONEY PIG

HONEY PIG

No. 415-3 XinYi Road, Sec. 4
台北市信義區信義路四段415號-3
(02) 2725-5757

closed as of 2021

MRT: Taipei 101

website: Honey Pig Taiwan's FB page

hours: 24 hours! (although I feel like sometimes when I drive by it doesn't look open 24 hours)

$$ (about NT$600/person)

Kid friendliness: high chairs available, as well as scissors to cut meat for kids

Visit reviewed:  11/12/2015
Last Visit reviewed: 1/9/2015

Round 1- kalbi, beef brisket, sliced pork belly, fresh pork belly

Round 2-spicy pork belly, spicy sliced pork belly, bulgogi, fresh pork belly, kimchi 

Revisited Honey Pig with some friends last week and was happy to find that I could make reservations over the phone fairly easily. The only thing is that they told me that the 12noon reservations for that day were full, so I had to choose 11AM or 12PM. It seems they stagger their seating so that the servers can cook for the tables at different times, as when we sat down there were only a couple other tables seated at 11AM.

The menu is slightly expanded from my last visit, with more soups and cooked foods available, as well as fresh romaine lettuce to wrap your bbq'd meats in.

There are also combos now that they didn't have at my last visit, during their opening weeks. They are a good deal if you have more people, but I wanted more kalbi and less thick cut pork belly slices. So if you're choosier about what you want, you should stick to ordering ala carte. We ended up with the Pork and Beef combo NT$2332 which saves you a few hundred NT and was two rounds on the grill and enough for 6 people. 

Fresh romaine (NT$100) 

Japchae Korean Stir fried noodles (NT$219)

This was good, with sizeable strips of meat and vegetables with the noodles. We wanted to get the kimchi fried rice, but they make it on the grill and the servers insist on making it after they cook your meat, so of course by the end of the meal we were too full to order it.

The servers are still a bit hard to wave down and the music was a bit too loud for some of my friends (especially if you sit near the speakers), but they are not as crazed and chaotic and overwhelmed as my previous visits when they first opened. 

CLOSED/korean: I recommend MOM's CHICKEN AND KIMBAP

This location closed when I went 8/2016. I think they may have moved to Ximen

MOM's CHICKEN AND KIMBAP 

馬咪炸雞塊&馬咪捲

No. 6, Lane 5, Tianmu W. Road

台北市士林區天母西路5巷4弄6號

(02) 2877-1223

MRT: Zhishan (but looks like 30 min walk from there)

Website: http://momscnk.com/store

Kid friendliness: kids can eat the non-saucy fried chicken or popcorn chicken. The kimbap is a good way to them to eat veggies 

Visit reviewed: 10/31/2015 and 10/26/2015

Opened a few weeks ago in Tianmu, Mom's Chicken and Kimbap focuses on  Korean fried chicken and kimbap aka Korean sushi, made by a few Korean moms using their moms' recipes, or so I heard from my friend who told me her friend opened it. 

Go for the addictive, saucy Korean fried popcorn chicken, Mom's Chicken Pop (NT$109) which comes in a convenient cup and lid to eat on the go. The owners say the sticky sweet sauce isn't spicy, and though it's more sweet than spicy, I think it does still have a kick to it. Korean fried chicken reminds me of orange chicken, but a fired up version. For those who are more sensitive, you can try the non-saucy version. Either way, the fried batter, the crunch, the juicy morsel of meat inside, it all works. If you've never had Korean fried chicken, it's fried twice so that it is irresistibly crispy and the batter doesn't fall apart from the meat and isn't too bready. 

Mom's Korean Chicken regular packages are family packs of wings and legs for NT$599-639 with fries and onion rings, or NT$399-439 for just the Korean fried chicken. I like the boneless popcorn chicken since I can eat it right away on the go, and don't have to get my hands dirty. The two bites of rice cake are also just enough to satisfy, but not feel overly heavy. 

Mom's BBQ kimbap (NT$118) wasn't what I thought it would be and the pork inside was dry. I wish they offered bulgogi kimbap, which I first tried at my friend's house. My friend's homemade kimbap is tastier. Otherwise, kimbap is not a bad way to get your veggies on the go, with carrots, cucumbers, pickled radish, egg inside. 

Mom's Chicken and Kimbap is in the alley right in front of McDonald's near the Tianmu circle for those of you in the neighborhood. Once you're in front of that alley, you will spot the bright orange sign. I love the name and the eye catching sign- it's quite clear what they are selling. Tiny space inside, only few spots for eating inside. Mostly for to-go orders. Owners spoke Chinese, Korean and English. Everything is made to order, and expect to wait at least 10 minutes or more for your order. They also have a stamp card, so make sure you get that.  I've been twice in one week which doesn't happen often, so I strongly recommend their #4 Mom's Chicken Pop, will have to try their Mom's Korean Chicken soon. I would give the whole shop a strongly recommend, but wavered because of the kimbap. I know there quite a few Korean fried chicken places in Taipei, especially after the popularity of You Who Came From the Stars, but most of them are sit down chicken and beer spots (Oppa, Chimac, Chicken in Bok and Beer, Ovenmaru, Palgoo Beer Chicken) and sometimes hard to get a table. This is easier to order and go, and now I'm addicted.

korean: AJEOSSI

AJEOSSI CAFE

No. 23-1, Minquan E Rd, Sec. 6, Neihu District
台北市內湖區民權東路六段217號 
(02) 2796-3616

MRT: Huzhou (Brown Line)

hours: 11:30AM - 9PM, Closed Mondays

website: Ajeossi Cafe's FB page

kid friendliness: no high chairs spotted, but room for strollers. non spicy dishes available 

visit reviewed:  9/10/2015

Ajeossi is a casual homestyle Korean cafe in Neihu, opened by Koreans owners in February 2015. Next door there was a ramen shop that had a line of 20 or so people waiting. At first, we thought the line was for Ajeossi, but alas it was not. Can different kinds of Korean food work in Taipei (besides the popular soondubu, kbbq and spicy rice cake hotpot)?

The atmosphere is like a coffee shop with warm wood walls and tables, with a projection screen playing Korean soaps over the bar/counter. A huge teddy bear keeps watch from the corner and two clocks hang on the wall, one with Taipei time and the other for Korea. 

Hello, Cheon Song Yi!

The menu has only ten or so dishes, with the focus being on drinks- O'Sulloc Korean tea, milk teas, coffee, tea, vinegar soda and a few cocktails. They also had desserts on their menu, but 2 out of 3 were crossed out. I could make out most of the dishes in Chinese, but luckily my friends read Korean, so they picked what to order. The first few are mostly rice and pork dishes (Soy sauce rice,  kimchi pork belly or spicy pork belly or kimchi fried rice with optional cheese),  the next three are Korean rice cake and the last is the cold noodles.   

We decided to get the Korean style soy sauce rice (NT$200),  kimchi pork belly with white rice (NT$200), cold ramen noodles with chogochujang (NT$180), and Korean rice cakes dubokki w spicy zhajiang sauce (NT$240). There's no English on the menus, so these are my translations! You can see the banchan is very simple- kimchi, seaweed and some pickles/cucumbers.

The first dish is something you could make at home, and something owners said that it's the kind of dish they make when there's nothing to eat at home. The Korean style soy sauce rice (NT$200) is rice mixed with soy sauce, fried egg and bacon and a pile of seaweed strips atop. There's no bimbimbap here, at least not the kind with all the julienned veggies that need a lot of prepping. I liked this, but if I made it myself I wouldn't mix soy sauce into the rice. 

The cold noodles (NT$180) was probably my favorite dish, though it wasn't the usual soupy naengmyeon. After quizzing my friend, she guessed that they used cho-gojuchang for the noodles. I knew about gochujang, Korean red pepper chili paste aka Korean sriracha, but I hadn't heard of chogojuchang which was more vinegary and spicy. Will have to find some #chogochujang sauce so I can try making this at home and experiment with both!! 

Again this is something you could probably make at home with the right condiment, since the cucumber, tomato and half boiled egg were more homestyle than precise. 

Korean rice cakes dubokki w spicy zhajiang sauce (NT$240) Korean zhajiang sauce is thicker and sweeter than Chinese zhajiang mian sauce and this dish also had a spicy kick. I liked this and it's very different than what you'd usually find around town. If we didn't get this, then I would have tried the ramen cheese spicy rice cake.

Kimchi pork belly with mini lettuce and white rice (NT$300)- Pork was a tad dry, but I still thought it was decent. It was better than a lot of the dishes that I've tried around town (I had some of the worst stringy bulgogi at usually good Dubu House last year)

Ajeossi's random location makes it so that you really have to seek it out if you didn't live in the neighborhood. It seems like a mostly residential neighborhood, so not an area I'd normally pass by. But I'm glad I got to try it and that it's offering a different type of Korean fare in Taipei. At the very least, if you're having Korean soap withdrawals, you know now where to go.

korean/bbq: i strongly recommend HONEY PIG

HONEY PIG
No. 415-3 XinYi Road, Sec. 4
台北市信義區信義路四段415號-3
(02) 2725-5757

MRT: Taipei 101

website: Honey Pig Taiwan's FB page

hours: 24 hours!

$$ (about NT$600/person)

Kid friendliness: high chairs available, as well as scissors to cut meat for kids

Visit reviewed: 1/9/2015

Taipei has apparently been starved for great Korean BBQ if these lines last week at the Honey Pig opening are any indication. FOUR TO SEVEN HOUR WAITS?! Is this craziness or what? You could fly to Korea for REAL KBBQ in that amount of time. A stream of people on Instagram's Honey Pig location tag declare how long they've waited like badges of honor. Would be diners bundled in coats and scarfs patiently wait outside in a single file line along the building, staring into the windows at diners already inside stuffing their face. At Honey Pig's entrance, a man dressed in a black suit and tie holds a clipboard like a bouncer at a club in K-town while K-pop videos and songs blast from the corner televisions. The servers drift from table to table with refills of kimchi, spicy bean sprouts, fried rice and raw meat to sizzle on the giant iron top grills. 

Honey Pig probably expected some great buzz- with the can't-miss it prime location the corner of Xinyi and Keelung, the attention drawing giant sign with English and Korean, and the cartoon smile of big haired co-owner Miki, who was there in person helping serve up customers and posed for selfies- but they probably didn't expect to lines to continue until 3AM onwards, around their open 24 hours clock.

glad we weren't seated along the windows where the lines were so people would be staring at us the whole time! 

I've never heard of Honey Pig before last week, when I spotted the Honey Pig sign on Xinyi and whats app messages from my friends started buzzing my phone. The original Honey Pig restaurants are in the states- gained a loyal following at its east coast restaurants in Virginia and Maryland with a sister restaurant in LA- and somehow the first overseas Honey Pig is in Taipei.  Luckily I had a friend who had a friend who had a reservation and thankfully asked if I wanted to join last Friday. 

When I arrived, food and soju were already on the table and mountains of beef bulgogi and pork belly took turns blanketing the grill. As raw meat came to the table, our server would clear space by moving cooked meats to one corner and spreading out the meats which cooked fairly quickly.  Anything that took extra time like the seafood pancake or the cold noodles were not available yet, only the steamed egg and I think tofu stew.

For the pork belly, I preferred the thinly sliced as opposed to the fatty thicker slice and recommend opting for the addition of the spicy sauce. My favorites that I will order again when I return are the spicy pork belly, the shrimp (surprisingly sweet and cooked perfectly so they weren't too dry-although this of course depends on who's doing the cooking for you) and the bulgogi. There are three kinds of beef short rib- #9 boneless rib, #10 kalbi beef rib and #11 LA beef rib.

#8 beef bulgogi (NT$519)

#9 boneless rib (NT$799) and #2 sliced pork belly (NT$299) You can also opt for pork or beef with octopus or squid, chicken, or beef stomach. 

#10 kalbi beef short ribs (NT$799)

#5 pork belly (NT$299)

When we saw the table next to us with rice on their grill we waved down our server and asked for the same. Pretty soon, Miki came by each table with a huge bowl of kimchi rice and scooped some for each table's grill, topped with some seaweed shreds and mixed together. It was probably faster than their usual way of doing it from scratch with a bowl of white rice, but it was faster and everyone just wanted to try it. Didn't quite get any crispy rice bits from the kimchi fried rice being grilled, but it was tasty. 

Hopefully as the craziness settles down, it would be great to see things like fresh lettuce and thin slices of radishes or rice noodles to wrap the meat in, or meats like beef tongue that they have on their US menus to try out here. And hopefully the service and portions remains the same after the training period is over and the US owners return to the states. Honey Pig is definitely worth trying out, but no restaurant is worth waiting in line for three plus hours when then there's so much to eat in Taipei, much less other Korean restaurants! Avoid the lines and make reservations- you might not be able to eat it until a few weeks later, but at least you won't have to have the stress and hunger pangs of waiting in line! 

korean: TOFU VILLAGE

TOFU VILLAGE 豆腐村

at In Base

No. 68 XinHu 2nd Road, Neihu

台北市新湖二路68號

(02) 2792-4989

MRT: no MRT in walking distance to this location in Neihu

website: Tofu Village FB page

hours: 11AM - 9:30PM

$$

Kid friendliness: non spicy tofus available, many meats and appetizers and tofu ice cream at end

Visit reviewed: 9/8/2014

Tofu Village holds the prize for being the first (and only) restaurant that I've seen in Taipei that has galbi jjim on the menu. For those of you who have never had galbi jjim, it's a delicious beef short rib dish that is steamed or braised in a sweet soy sauce until it is fall off the bone tender. The pureed Korean pear, onions and kiwi in the recipe tenderizes the meat as well as adds layers of sweetness, so the sometimes tough short rib becomes melt in your mouth goodness. My standard for galbi jjim is from a little restaurant in Koreatown LA called Seong Buk Dong, which charges a small ransom for the homemade dish, but I still pay it because it's that good. I even begged a friend for crib notes of their family's recipe and made it with a thinner cut short rib that was pretty amazing.

So back to Tofu Village- was their galbi jjim worth ordering?

Korean soondubu tofu stews have become quite popular in the last few years in Taipei, so we've seen the opening of a lot of sit down restaurants, whereas before I could only find it in the mall food courts or localized Korean spots. (That's actually one reason I was surprised to see that Ari Tofu House had closed down).

The menu at Tofu Village has a couple pages of appetizers- Korean pancake, pork fried kimchi, spicy Korean rice cake (tteokbokki) which they call rice pasta, and japchae - as well as meat dishes- spicy chicken,  spicy pan fried pork and vegetables, bulgogi, and galbi jjim. There's about 13 tofu stews on the menu, including vegetarian, kimchi, clam, mushroom, seafood and ham & cheese.

Panchan that day included potato salad, kimchi, seaweed, dragon beard veggies and spicy fish cake.

I ordered the Seafood Beef combo tofu stew (NT$279) which came with shrimp, clams, oyster and beef, in a mild spiciness as well as a bowl of purple rice. Good amount of tofu, soup and stuff inside- I finished it.

The galbi jjim (NT$480) looked promising when it arrived at the table, but the meat was so tough, it was impossible to take bites of the beef. Either they didn't marinate it with the right tenderizing recipe or they didn't cook it long enough? After we showed the server, they offered to replace it and whisked it away. But the replacement dish was even worse than the first time, with a sauce and meat being too salty to eat and the meat was still rubbery. So unfortunately, I'm going to have just make it at home until I find another place that makes it. Thanks A for the recipe tips!!

And at the end of the meal, you can opt to get some ice cream made from tofu. I thought it had a weird flavor, but it's complimentary so you can give it a try. Tofu Village is decent enough that I'd come back for the tofu stews and try a few other of their dishes, but I wouldn't go out of my way eat here unless I was nearby. This particular location is in the middle of a ton of shopping centers- there's Carrefour (Taipei's Kmart), RT Mart (which has a Nike outlet), HOLA (Taipei's Bed Bath and Beyond), B&Q (hardware store, reminded me of Home Depot), and last but not least, Costco, all in walking distance from each other.  

OTHER LOCATIONS

Bellavita

No. 28 Song Ren Rd. B2, Xinyi District

台北市信義區松仁路28號B2

(02) 8729-2733

No. 50 ZhongXiao W. Rd, Sec. 1, 3F

台北市中正區忠孝西路一段50號3樓 

(02) 2371-4989