Beef Noodle Soup Roundup
Located at 158 Hsue Shi Road (學士路), General Beef Noodles has been run by it's founder, Zhang Bei He (張北河) for pretty much forever. He's a character who speaks the kind of Mandarin we students of the language have heard so much about but rarely hear. He came to my attention when my wife mentioned a report on TV and the newspapers about him. Seeking to retire, he auctioned off his secret (the ancient Chinese kind) recipe to a Taipei woman for about $13,000,000NT. Well, now. I was just going to have to try them, and last Sunday, my wife and I did.
We arrived at about 1:30 and the place was busy. We had to stand in line to order and then sit for about 20 minutes to be served. How to start? Not with the noodles, that's for sure. Taiwanese can tell you whether they're homemade, fresh, wheat, rice...whatever. Me, I can only tell you that there were noodles. We went in expecting a lot and that's what we got - a lot. A big, weedy vacant lot when we were expecting swimming pools and movie stars. Look at the picture below. No, your eyeballs are not on acid. That is the first use of Crayola's Neon Carrot (broth), Hot Magenta (beef) and Screamin' Green (the greens) in culinary use that I've ever seen. Michael Turton posted a review from Wilds of Change blog that has a different opinion from me, but both my wife (Taiwanese) and myself (American) reached the same conclusions independently. While Wilds of Change complains of overuse of star anise in most beef noodles, I would have welcomed that or just some street dust wafting into my bowl because there was just no taste. My wife - Bland. Me - Insipid. The beef was sliced and distinguishable from the broth only by appearance and texture. I don't know what he's doing to those Crayons, because when I used to eat them I remember them having a hell of a lot more taste than this.
3 comments:
er..... so what did it taste like?
Perhaps you've just got so used to the super salty food here that anything else just tastes bland. Also, you were probably expecting something special because it had been featured on the news so it's almost inevitable that you ended up feeling underwhelmed. I went there knowing nothing about the place.
As for other beef noodle places, I've yet to find somewhere that's really anything to write home about.
Peter, I admit I did have high expectations. However, I have yet to get a good opinion of it from any Taiwanese person I've talked to and that has been many. The highest praise I heard was one guy named Quincy who scowled and said it was "Okay." He then went on to recommend three other places that he thought were much better.
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