Giguo Taipei Nanjing East Branch — Restaurant in Zhongshan District

This was the first time I had Japanese hot pot. It's a bit disorienting, but the easiest way is to go for the single person set menu. Then you'd be asked to

pick the main entree out of choices of 5 (beef, low fat beef, pork, chicken, or seafood) pick a broth out of choices 5 (I picked kelp with herbs which was quite nice) Then the confusing one: the vegetable platter comes with 3 different kinds of "pastes" to pick from. Think of these as grounded raw meats. The meats or seafood pastes came on a half open pipe with a mini spatula to scrape the meat into the boiling broth. I had to ask what to do with them! The fish paste came in plastic bags with corner cut off so you can squeeze them much like cake icing. Next, you pick either rice or noodles. I don't recommend rice unless your broth is super spicy. Then the drink. I strongly recommend the smoothie because the other two choices are hot tea which is superfluous to the broth, which is already more than plenty. And finally the dessert. You can't go wrong, but if you had smoothie for drink you might want to settle with sesame puddling instead of the red bean shaved ice,

Everyone gets a small shot of cold plum vinegar drink which is really quite refreshing. The sensation is similar to champagne sorbet at a good Italian restaurant.

Everything came at the same time except for dessert. Unlike Chinese hot pots, the dipping sauces are premixed for you. You get both the peanut paste based sauce and the radish based sauce. In my opinion, they're both quite lame compared to the Chinese varieties.

Set menu is NT$398 pp. 10% service fee is automatically added to the bill, which is not common in Taiwan, but considering a amount of items they have to bring to the table, it's well justified. I had a great experience here as my last meal before concluding my...

We had a family outing just yesterday (February 1st, 2025) where we made a reservation for a party of 12 at 5:40 pm.

First off, when there’s a large party like this, it’s a no-brainer that we would all want to sit together but whoever was responsible for the tabling/seating logistics messed up and split us into a 2 vs 10 seating with a large space in between us all.

Second of all, the time limit of 90 minutes for dining should really be calculated when ALL the food items have been fully served and not when we first sit down (pre-ordering time). By the time we all started to eat, there was a bunch of issues with parts of orders missing (frozen bear, accompaniment of soup bases..etc.) and there was also a quality issue with meat platters.

The servers around the area were completed flustered and unable to handle the needs of the crowds and atmosphere. This all added to the inconsistencies of getting everyone’s orders on the table.

At one point during our dining, white rice was completely unavailable and we had to wait or find alternatives to substitute the rice.

The hotpot vegetables were served fairly fresh as a self-serve section but each portion is tiny so it’s picked through really quickly but too fast for it to be replenished in a decent manner.

The entire operation is a complete mess and I most definitely would not want to return unless I absolutely have to (aka when there’s nowhere else to do) - but in the case of finding amazing, good quality food in Taiwan, there will always be somewhere great to go to as an...

December 3, 2024, 6:30pm had dinner for two persons.

I strongly recommend another hot pot restaurant, 築間 (JhuJian).

When I entered the restaurant, I went to the bathroom first. The bathroom for women was damn dirty and smelly! There were total 3 rooms. The first sitting toilet had full of toilet paper in the toilet, and the water didn’t even be flashed. The toilet, the toilet seat, and the ground were wet and dirty! The third sitting toilet’s toilet and the sitting seat were damn dirty because had pee and poo on them! So, only left the Asian toilet! The ground was wet and dirty in the second toilet room and it’s hard stand on the ground because no much clean space to stand! And there’s fly （蒼蠅) in it! The hygiene was damn disgusting enough!

We ordered two sliced beef sets for two persons and the price was the cheapest one of the beef ($448/per set, hasn’t add the 10% fee) and the quantity of the beef wasn’t even 170g as the clerk of that restaurant told me on the phone. Only idiot would pay $100 more to increase 50% quantity of this sliced beef. The quantity of the sliced beef was just 120g by just checking them by eyes, and the quantity was definitely not 170g for sure, and the sliced beef was damn thin and the pieces of the slice beef was just 7 damn thin and narrow sliced beef. Especially compare it to another hot pot restaurant 築間 (JhuJian), that I just went to few days ago, which meat’s quantity is 200g for the basic quantity, and for the same sliced beef, the sliced beef was much thicker, wider, and there were more pieces, especially the price and the quantity for the same sliced beef was also cheaper than 聚. No wonder there were more than some people wrote bad comments and wrote the quantity of the meat was less than before in their comments of this restaurant’s google reviews.

Moreover, if you check the ingredients, you’d know they didn’t wash the ingredients, the soil and the black spots were on the mushrooms, and the some of the vegetable (小白菜） was mouldy, that was grey mould!

We will never go to ‘聚’ this restaurant...