April 04, 2009
潮品集
At five weeks it's time to show him the outside world a bit. A quick jaunt around the NTU campus in the late afternoon and then take the wife's mother and aunt out to dinner to thank them for helping with the wife and baby during the 月子 recuperation period. The baby's in his stroller, so we needed a roomy, clean restaurant. A hotel restaurant seemed like the best way go. San Want Hotel is on the way home, and we've been to its signature Cantonese restaurant a few times before with good experiences, a good safe choice.
The restaurant offers private banquet rooms to the side for large family gatherings, as well as a main room for smaller parties. The decor is nicely modern-Asian, in please dark reds and blacks, with halogen spots for bright lighting at the table without flooding the space with excess light. They offer a menu of full dishes, as well as a small but well-chosen set of dim-sum ordered a-la-carte. They were also offering a special lobster-prixe-fixe menu that night. For the four of us, two of the set meals supplemented by some classic dim-sum favorites was the perfect amount of food for a nice but casual dinner.
They were nice enough to let us use a spare banquet room for a quick pre-game diaper change for the kid. He fell asleep in the stroller once we set the bed flat and pulled the shade down, allowing us to have a peaceful meal without disrupting other people, a big relief.
The set-meal offered some non-conventional dishes like salad with Japanese sesame dressing and lamb chops. The lobster butter-sauce spaghetti is my go-to dish when I have to host overseas visitors at our China factory. But here wife and I took both shares since the obasans don't like the strong cream flavor.
The dim-sum items like 蘿蔔糕, 腸粉, and 蝦餃 could be found at any dim-sum place, but they do the basics as well as any place we've tried in Taiwan. Most importantly, the food was served quickly enough so we could finish our meal just as the baby woke up and started crying for mommy. It's good to know that it'll still be possible for us to have a nice meal out once in a while, even with newborn in tow.
潮品集
神旺大飯店
台北市忠孝東路四段172號
02-2772-2687