CLOSED desserts/japanese: MICASA DOLCI PATISSERIE

MICASA DOLCI PATISSERIE
No. 462, Ren Ai Road, Sec. 4
(02) 2345-7669  CLOSED

MRT: Taipei City Hall

hours: 10 AM - 7 PM (although I've passed by at 6:30PM and they were closed)

$$

Kid friendliness: no high chairs, lots of desserts

Visit reviewed: 9/2/2009



If eating is an art, then Micasa Dolci presents its desserts for your viewing and tasting pleasure.

From the purple umbrellas that welcome you at the entrance to the chandelier-decked vibrant walls in the decor and menu to the intricate plating of the desserts, to appreciate Micasa Dolci one probably has to appreciate the entire "experience."




Because if you just take the food for face value, it's going to be a pricey bite per dollar ratio. While I enjoyed most of the artfully crafted sugar rushes, it's not everyday you'll spend NT$400 on one of the smallest chocolate molten cakes I've seen yet.



But maybe that's the point- To savor the flavors and enjoy each bite. And since these desserts were split among girlfriends, we pretty much all got just a taste or two. And you could taste the richness of the chocolate they used.

The dusting of matcha powder on the cake led the way to a scoop of house-made green tea ice cream which had a wonderful aromatic flavor. We weren't sure what to do with the spoonful of raspberry sauce, decided to dip a little of the cake in it.



My favorite though, was the caramel ice cream with banana (NT$350), garnished with savory sabayon sauce. The whipped custard sauce tasted as if it had been topped with sugar and caramelized which gave the caramel ice cream slightly burnt crunchy creme brulee coating. It was like two awesome desserts married in one- creme brulee meets banana split makes the perfect dessert baby.



Less impressive was the cream puff (NT$70), which I picked partially because it was one of the cheapest desserts on the menu (though more expensive than most other cream puffs). It turned out to be a moot point, as there was a minimum NT$200 per sitting customer amount each person had to spend, so we ended up having to order some tea for the table.



The puff itself was a bit dry and lacked moistness and flavor in the meat of the pastry that the cream wasn't able to compensate for. The other ladies at the table barely touched it, and it went unfinished. I would have rather eaten a puff and half from Beard Papa's instead.

You can give the sculptural baked seasonal fruit pie with ice cream (NT$350) a try, which looked like a dressed up, grown up version of the Hostess fruit pies I used to love as a kid, decked out in strings of sugar and dusted with powder.



Somewhere under there is some strawberry ice cream and apple pie, which is more crust than filling. It would have been great if they could have stuffed it a little fuller with apples to balance out all the flaky crust.



So if you're a dessert first person or looking for a place to sit down after taking touristy pictures across the street at the Sun Yat Sen Memorial Hall, you can give Micasa Dolci a try. I'm not sure if I would go out of my way again to eat there again, but it's worth a visit if the desserts look worth the price to you. Other exotic sounding desserts on the English, Chinese and Japanese menu included coffee jelly with vanilla pudding and caramel sauce, tiramisu with sesame ice cream, sweet potato montblancs or grenandine peach compote and honey ice cream. They offer some lunch sets as well, that day curry or tea sandwiches were available.

You can even pick up pints of their ice cream from the freezer or boxes of cookies to go. Just call ahead and make sure they are open because the last few times I've driven by at different times, it looked closed.




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CLOSED! dessert/frozen yogurt: SHERRY's FROZEN YOGURT

edit 10/12/09- CLOSED!

SHERRY's FROZEN YOGURT
No. 23, Lane 187, Dun Hua S. Road, Sec. 1
(02) 2775-4610

website: sherrysyogurt.com

$-$$

Kid friendliness: some seating, mostly to-go

Visit reviewed: 9/8/2009



We've come a long way from the meager days of drooling over Pinkberry and Yogurtland in the states. Now there seems to be new pink frozen yogurt places popping up everywhere I turn.

I was meeting up with a new friend and we wanted to get the waffle from Room From Dessert. The last time I was there, I wasn't able to get any good pictures and they had one of the best waffles I've had in Taipei, plus it came with a small side of frozen yogurt!

But when we went there, we realized it had closed down!!!! And was now a second hand luxury goods shop. ARGH! So we wandered down the alley and saw the sign for Sherry's Frozen yogurt and decided to give it a try.



Inside, it's pretty tiny, but has a few bar stools to sit on, or a table outside. Their frozen yogurts come in S, M or L (NT$85-130) or you could get a shake (NT$135). With four flavors to choose from- Original, Strawberry, Mango and Blackberry- they gave us samples to try all four, which were surprisingly all tart. Also, they had a special promotion since they had just opened a few weeks ago for 20% off all orders.

I ended up getting a Mango Shake (NT$135) which was blended mango yogurt and fresh mangos. It was a bit thick and there were no bits of mango, so kind of like drinking a melting frozen yogurt.



My friend got small strawberry frozen yogurt with mango and oreos (NT$90). The oreo cookie was placed whole and not pre-crumbled, so she just ate it like a regular cookie.



They also had some other fruit, berry, candy and cereal toppings, but it was hard to see in their covered trays. The selection isn't as huge as Yogurtland or YoFroyo and price is more expensive, maybe to account for rent in the area?



The week after I spotted this place, I spotted Hielo and gave it a try (review coming soon!). Overall, Sherry's Frozen Yogurt and the new wave of yogurt places are an improvement on the city's first attempts at frozen yogurt last year- >Yogurt Me and Sweetberry.

I do wish that Room for Dessert was still around. Anyone know where to get good waffles now?

news/taipei: one more month to see Pixar: 20 Years of Animation in Taipei

We all have our memories of the various Pixar movies over the years- I laughed out loud at Buzz and Woody and the aliens in TOY STORY. I teared up at the "When She Loved Me" Sarah McLachlan montage in TOY STORY 2 and of course, at UP. I loved feeling silly for ever being scared of my closet after MONSTERS INC. I was giddy like a fan after shaking Brad Bird's hand and getting an autograph after an advance screening of THE INCREDIBLES. Being fascinated by the behind the scenes drama of Pixar's rocky start when at first no one wanted to distribute Toy Story or make its toys in The Pixar Touch. I also remember the first time I pored over "The Art of Monsters Inc" and was fascinated by the hand drawn art, the changes in design and story, and the four to six years process that it takes to make an animated feature, that I ended up collecting each one that came out, like the newest Art of UP.

So getting to see all the storyboards, character models, hand drawn art and animatics in real life is like taking a walk down memory lane- can you believe it's been almost 20 years since Toy Story first came out?!

Pixar: 20 Years of Animation is at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, which is a 5 minute walk from the Yuanshan MRT stop.



Inside, you'll have life sized sketches of Mike and Scully greeting at every turn.



Headsets are available to listen (in Chinese) for more details at certain points. I also picked up a NT$150 program that makes a nice keepsake.



Once upstairs, the entrance is the last place you are allowed to bust out your camera, until you exit the exhibit. (But if you want a peek, one person was able to get some snapshots.) I felt like I was entering into another world, with the appropriate images of the assembly line of closet doors to whisk us away.



Isn't it cool to see how Pixar takes a black and white sketch and creates full blown 3D characters that we've grown to love? It's always more than just the images, it's also the stories that have created a worldwide fanbase.





It was fairly crowded on a Wednesday afternoon when I went yesterday, so I can only imagine that the weekend could be nuts. It makes it hard to get up close to see the detail of some of the drawings, but there's hundreds to look at, as well as some multimedia stuff towards the end.

Watch some of Pixar's early short films, an installation called Artscape, or my favorite, a zoetrope that brings a spinning disk of still models from Toy Story 2 to animated life in front of your eyes.

Walking through the exhibition, you marvel at how everything is archived and then shipped around the world. I can only imagine all the packing, unpacking, hanging, taking down, and repeat! Props to Elyse Klaidman, who is Pixar's in-house curator and who first came up with the idea for having an in-house gallery in 2000.



And of course a chance to buy some Pixar goodies at the end before you leave the museum. The exhibition is around for another month until November 1st, so catch it before the last week gets crazy crowded!

Pixar: 20 Years of Animation
Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM),
No. 181, Zhongshan N Rd, Sec 3
(02) 2595-7656

When: Until Nov. 1. Open Tuesdays to Sundays
hours: 9:30am to 5:30pm and until 8:30pm on Saturdays
online.tfam.museum/pixar

Some fun Pixar sites
http://www.pixar.com
http://www.pixartalk.com/
Pixar stuff at Amazon.com

my kitchen/news: oatmeal chocolate chip cookies

Thank goodness for ovens and Betty Crocker. I love freshly baked cookies out of the oven. I think I must have eaten at least three yesterday... and two more this morning.



I also have been drooling over the tastespotting.com and the archives of justjenn whose rants and raves cracks me up.


from justjennrants.blogspot.com

I love the Hello Kitty cupcakes, firetruck and dinosaur cookies, and crazy creativity she has in her baking and decorating and sense of humor in her writing. I definitely want to try a lot of stuff she's made someday- if only I could get over my fear of fondant.

Also, this is what I call service... do you think the Far Eastern hotel will keep the burgers and steaks supersized after the visiting NBA players leave? And while the players get taken to all the required touristy spots this week- do you think they'll get taken to a night market? That's where I'd want to go!

night market/taiwanese: i strongly recommend LEHUA NIGHT MARKET

LEHUA NIGHT MARKET
Yonghe Road and Zhongshan Road

MRT: DingXi Station

website: Public Health Bureau gov.tw
hours: 4 PM- 1 AM

$

Kid friendliness: lots to eat and play, though can be crowded

Visit reviewed: 5/20/2009



Stinky tofu- check!



Shaved ice- check!



Cute animals to gawk at -check!



Cheap goods to bargain for- check! And rows and rows to shop and eat- check.

Now you know you are at a Taipei night market.



When I first came back to Taipei after 17 years for the infamous Love Boat, the only night market I knew about was Shilin. After all, that was the closest one to campus and easy to get to. It was the biggest and the best, so there was no need to discover any others. But since living and eating in Taipei with it being my home, there's an abundance of awesome night markets here.

Lehua Night Market has all those things, plus a few variations of the familiar, located in Yong He, a suburb which is a bit southwest of downtown Taipei city. I have an aunt that lives in Yonghe, so she is always wanting to take us there to eat, but I've only been there twice. It's definitely worth visiting.



It's the first time I had Snowflake Ice or "Shue Hua Bing" which is shaved ice with milk in it already, which my aunt delighted in being the first person to introduce it to me and my sister. "What?! You NEVER had shue hua bing before? Never?" she exclaimed in shock to both of us, in Mandarin.



Nope, never. But it was pretty fantastic. The ice itself is superfine, like how you would imagine sticking out your tongue and eating freshly fallen snow. It's also a bit sweet, since the ice has milk in it instead of water. Then of course, you dump more condensed milk ontop and your choice of toppings- pudding is pretty good- to eat before it melts on a hot summer night.

Or you can opt for Aiyu bing or a lemon jelly with chunky ice that we got with boba. But I'd pick the snowflake ice!



After the sweet, we had some salty, or should I say stinky. Apparently, this vendor is pretty famous and has the newsclips to prove it.



The stinky tofu had some of the crispiest skin I'd ever tasted, like a crunchy shell to the spongy pungent inside. Complete with a heap of pickled cabbage and sauce, the guy deserved his newsclips- it was some of the best stinky tofu I've had.



So wander over the Lehua night market if you've never been. It's oh so sweet and stinky.


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indian: i strongly recommend SAFFRON

SAFFRON
38-6, TianMu E Rd
(02) 2871-4842

Hours: Lunch: 11:30AM - 2PM (closed Mon lunch)
Dinner: 5:30PM - 9:30PM

$$

Kid friendliness: no high chairs available

Visit reviewed: 1/18/2009



The past week, two of my friends happened to bring up how Saffron is the best Indian food in Taipei. And I agree. Though it's a bit far for me in Tienmu, I've been daydreaming about going back and ordering the Chicken Murgh Mahkmali Tikka (NT$360) and the Lamb Safed Rajasthani Ghost (NT$380).



I'm a chicken tikka masala and tandoori chicken kind of girl. Most of the time when I eat at an Indian restaurant, that's what I gravitate towards. That's what I know and like. I don't want it too spicy and I like it a little sweet.

So when the server handed us a menu with a lot of unfamiliar dishes and names and no pictures and recommended some new dishes, I was nervous.



But I'm glad I ordered out of my comfort zone because otherwise I would have never gotten to try some of my new favorites. And although the names don't roll off the tip of my tongue yet, it's okay because I'm more confident that the others dishes on Saffron's menu will be equally satisfying.

Next time, I will probably pick the vegetarian samosas (NT$170) over the methi pakora (NT$170) which is chopped fenugreek, onion and potato and green chili deep fried in chick pea batter.




The naan (NT$75) is made to order by the chef in the corner working at the tandoor- it's huge, hot and puffy and good. You can wander over and watch while you wait for your food to come.




At first glance, the portions for the curries seem small, but the dishes are deep and there's a lot hiding inside. I also like that Saffron's curries are rich without being greasy, and all the flavors were distinct from each other, rather than each curry being indistinguishable from the next as I've experienced at some places.

I enjoyed the sweet eggplant Baigan Bharta (NT$270) which were charcoal flamed aubergines flavored with garlic, coriander and onion...



and the spicy bhindi masala, (NT$240) okra cooked in kadai spices sprinkled with coriander.



The Murgh Makhmali Tikka (NT$360) had a creamy, nutty taste and the boneless chicken was tender and juicy.



Being one of the newer Indian restaurants in town, it's elegantly decorated with some fun seating in the corners with colorful pillows and areas to lounge. It's right next door to the Spice Shop which I've also heard is good, but it's funny that they are seriously right next door to each other.

Writing up this post, the pictures have my tastebuds salivating over all again. Has anyone been? Where is your favorite Indian restaurant in Taipei?


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