XXXIII: A ducky affair

Please ask your non-banana Chinese friend to translate this for you because I sure can't. It is located here with a shop of its own. While it may be located nowhere near any tourist attraction, this is going to be one of the best things you can have in Taipei. And I kid you not because I have eaten quite of lot of stuff while try.

We were initially there for a Western style breakfast of sandwich but the guy didn't get our order so we kinda gave up after enjoy half our coffee and decided to try this instead. As again, the menu is in Chinese only but when you get a nice whiff of the aromatic herbal soup in the air, there's bound to be a winner in there. Somewhere.

It's a place specializing in duck (look at its logo, duh) but also does serve lamb. 

Herbal duck soup with noodles. Unlike our yellow noodles, these doesn't have that slight chemical taste in them. The soup is certainly cooked with herbs but it's like a very mild herbal soup. But then again, most of the food that we tried in Taipei seemed to be toned down on the sodium level. Maybe it's them trying to be more health conscience?

The duck was cooked in the soup so it acted like some marinade, making it taste less gamy. Still, it wasn't cooked long enough thus, rendering the meat still slightly tough and took some chewing and biting from the bones. If it had more herbal to it and the meat was soft, it would have been the perfect meal on a cold day.

Duck bento.
The Taiwanese have the habit of labeling any singular portion of rice meal with a choice of meat and/or veggie as bento which is quite misleading because if this was really a bento, I'd call it a bento for cats because it's quite small. But then again, this is the small portion and there is a large portion.

It's braised duck in herbal gravy with peanuts. This turned out to be the best damn thing I tasted in Taipei. Of course, there's the sushi but as far as Taiwanese food goes, this takes the honor. The meat is chopped up into pieces so you don't get the same issue with the noodle soup. The rice also has a slightly oily texture to it, I think it's gravy because it had to be the one meal I've had that which was salted to my Malaysian palette (read: salty). The closest thing I could describe this would be duck version of ru rou fan or minced pork rice which is another Taiwan specialty.