After eating one mind-blowingly delicious meal after another here, it’s beginning to dawn on me that Taiwan is one of the best countries for food that I’ve ever visited. Everything I’ve tried has been so good, and everywhere I go there’s one restaurant after another with food that looks delicious. And the street food! And the night markets! It’s overwhelming.
I just had a dish called pork chop rice from Emperor Foods, and guess what? It was delicious.
Actually, no, I’m not sure that “delicious” quite conveys it. It was phenomenal; it was one of the best meals I’ve had since coming here, which is saying a lot when basically everything I’ve eaten has been so good.
The meal comes with three things: a very simple soup, a bowl with various pickled veggies and a saucy tofu and meat concoction, and the eponymous pork chop.
There’s also a little jar of a very thick, oily chili sauce on each table, and holy crap, do not sleep on that sauce. You need that sauce in your life. It’s actually not all that spicy, but it has an amazingly intense flavour, with a tangy, almost sour note that’s completely irresistible. You can reliably depend on the chili sauce at a restaurant like this being good, but even by those standards, this was good.
But then everything was good. That bowl of rice was zippy, garlicky, meaty, and delicious. I could have eaten just that and it would have been a satisfying meal.
There’s still the pork chop, however, and holy moly it was amazing. It was actually quite similar to the pork chop I had at Jia Yuan, but as good as that was (and it was very good), this one blows it out of the water. The exterior is almost ridiculously crispy and perfectly seasoned, and the meat itself is improbably tender. Like, how do they get a pork chop to be this tender?? Is there magic involved? Because I feel like there has to be magic involved.
Location: No. 37, Hengyang Road, Zhongzheng District, Taipei City, Taiwan 100
How to find it: It’s actually quite easy to find, with its English name front-and-centre on the sign. Speaking of which, they have an English menu, so the whole process is a snap. If you’re in Taipei, you have no excuse not to go here.