Friday, September 05, 2008

Is it still mooing?

So tonight I had one of the worst steak dinners I can conjure up in my twisted brain.
A couple friends were going to dinner at this restaurant that I have passed numerous times. There is always a crowd of people outside waiting so I'm thinking the place must be pretty good.
Turns out these people have never actually experienced a real steak and so are being sadly misled by this place.
The staff is friendly and there is English on the menus so we're off to a good start.
I order a 10 oz sirloin, med rare with mushroom sauce. (There were no cuts of meat smaller than that)
The meal came with a salad buffet and several other small appetizer type foods. The deep friend tofu was pretty tasty.
Our plates are brought to the table, hot and sizzling (think fajitas at Chili's).
My steak is covered in an orange sauce that has one mushroom floating in it.
It is also sitting atop a bed of noodles and a fried egg. Hmmm. I had seen this at other tables and mistakenly thought that you had to order your meal like that to receive it. Apparently this is standard issue across Taiwan unless you go into a specifically western steak house such as Outback.
Alright, this is not that big a deal. I've had strange approximations of American food before that have turned out to be pretty tasty.
This was not one of them. I cut into my meat and it literally started bleeding. It was not pink in the middle it was red. It was warm all the way through, but that is the only resemblance it had to being cooked medium rare. I think that if you order rare they just throw the cut of meat on the plate and bring it out to you. There was also a fair amount of gristle. The mushroom sauce was just odd. It was flavorless yet left an aftertaste. Happily there was A-1 on the table so I scraped off the sauce and doused it in A-1.
So that was my slight horrific meal. I guess I'm not really surprised. I did only pay about $10 US dollars for it. Luckily the salad buffet was pretty good and I filled up on that.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Fun!!! Scary...but fun! Ok, so maybe fun is a little strong of a word for what that was, but still. Your in an asian country...how could they know how to cook a steak??

Tanya said...

This is a country that wants everyone to know how to speak American English and to adopt many of it's customs. One of those customs is a properly cooked cut of meat. They need to be taught.