Menya Teru Taipei Shop — Restaurant in Zhongshan District

tsukemen is always delicious, and menya teru whips out a pretty yummy bowl. definitely can’t compare to other ones i’ve had before, but it still makes for a great meal. they give you a whole jug of tea for self-serving, and it’s a pretty warm and inviting atmosphere if you’re just dining alone. service is also really friendly! their tsukemen soup is really flavourful, earthy, and thick, with subtle tones of seafood in it which makes it unique. there are chunks of pork, and i will say that the salty charshu was the perfect balance between leanness and fattiness. for the fattier pieces, it melted in your mouth and you could taste a torched char/burn, which goes well with the crunchy green onions in the soup. the egg topping is also great though, i love how creamy the egg yolk is and how bouncy the egg white is — it’s marinated perfectly. the noodles were a bit disappointing however — portion was a bit small for a medium size, and the noodles were just hard to bite off. it wasn’t very “QQ”, and they were very tough. i added rice to my leftover soup at the end (definitely recommend), but be careful not to add too much stock soup to your broth, since it loses flavour/saltiness VERY fast and it’s not as savoury anymore. but the rice was warm and comforting and mushy, which i liked. maybe i had too high expectations coming in, since menya teru used to be this GOD for me growing up, but i don’t think i would come back again for tsukemen when there are many better...

It was quite packed during lunch hours, though not necessarily from the working crowd nearby. There were also quite some young college students. The place is mainly run by a Japanese gentleman who speaks little mandarin. I could feel the Japanese-style hospitality upon arrival. Sitting at the bar allowed me to see what's going on at the kitchen. It is quite authentic in terms of how they prepared the food, and the owner used a string hanging from the ceiling in front of him to cut the eggs to halves. This is probably something you'd get to see and figure out if you sit at the bar.

The signature is the char siow ramen. There are two lunch sets; one comes with a dish of Japanese style fried chicken (2pc) and your choice of cold dish out of either sliced cucumbers or sprouts with spinach at ntd240, and the other comes with a small bowl of char siow rice at ntd260. There's no service charge, and free malt tea is available upon self-service. The raman can come in hot broth, or be served as cold noodles to dip into their thick sauce. The char siow slices are standard though I didnt like one of them which has merely no meat but all fat. The eggs are done to almost perfection. The thick sauce is very flavorful though a bit too heavy in taste for light eaters. There were some small pieces of char siow in the sauce by accident, which I found even better than the slices on top of...

We come here often because it's close to where we live and it's convenient. There used to be a Japanese lady staff who remembers and smiles at us, that's the nice part. Everything else is mediocre, the food is fine but I wouldn't call it a treat, I always order the tsukemen because they make good noodles (they used to make it in-house, not sure if they still do that), and the soup that comes with the tsukemen is very inconsistent, some days it's watery some days it's thick, some days it has nice bits of meat some days almost no trace. I guess the final straw was the weird rules like you cannot order some things for takeout but they only tell you that after you ordered using the vending machine (they started writing signs about it after we complained), and you also cannot sit at a table if your whole party hasn't arrived yet even if the place is half empty. Anyway, I recommend going to this place especially when you're hungry and do not...