Argentinian Food- Gauchos

I apologize for only adding this now, it has been a busy few weeks

Having your birthday very close to Christmas, in a word, sucks. I’ll be honest.

 As a kid, you often get one gift spread between the two events (my parents bless ‘em did their best to give two). As an adult, nobody has any money to go out, because they’ve either run out after having an expensive month already, or my birthday falls on the day they go out for the office party (as it would be in the motherland), or they are bracing themselves for Christmas/New year celebrations and they can’t have another party. Boo-hoo, I will now cry in the corner.

Anyway, in Taiwan every year, not just the year when Azathoth took over, Christmas is a non-event. Restaurants and bars will have events for expats to go to remember stuff as it was in our previous countries, but for most local people it is a gift exchange, or if you teach kids a chance to dress up and sing songs. Not counting the Christians of course, who observe it as you would expect. It being their big day and everything. It is, in general, a work day. I figured for my birthday/Christmas this year I’d go out for steak in an Argentinian restaurant, because I can and why not? It has been an ambition of mine to eat steak from South America, it is a bit expensive so what better a time than me birfdee?

I brought along the missus, as she was paying, and she is my wife, as well as Preschooler, who had agreed to come out a few months ago after we had done a major deal on the sofa. We shook on the fact that her giving me some of her chocolate bread would guarantee entry to my birthday party. All parties were satisfied with the deal.

Gauchos is part of the Maji Square food area near to Yuanshan MRT, in the same place as the “famous” Taiwan Flora Expo from a few years ago which was big news at the time, but I didn’t go because I hate crowds. First impressions of the place were great; you could see they knew what they were doing. Money was sort of no object, as it was birthday related, but we didn’t go nuts (it would have been very easy to). First up were chicken empanadas, we ordered a set of four but you could have six. Fantastic, a bit spicy and also came in three other flavors. We ordered the Spanish omelet so we could make sure that the young ‘un would be eating something other than fries (it took some coaxing), we probably enjoyed it more than she did.

Next up were the mains, the missus went for pork, a massive piece for such a wee lass, but she polished it off without too much trouble. I had a bit and we both had nothing but praise for that. As it is a steak house, I had to go for and went for the middle ground, but was pretty hefty. It had the proper scorch marks, could tell the meat had been wood fired and yep, it was a proper “bye bye belt!” moment. Really really good. As we let slip it was my birthday, I got a free cake, complete with happy birthday sung in Spanish, which on a normal day would have got to me because of my introverted nature, but I had no issues there. Damn good chocolate fondant thingy too.

Then we came to dessert. Now, Mrs. Bao has a weird hatred for crumble. I have no idea why, it can’t come from a traumatic childhood experience, because crumble just doesn’t exist here. Is it a texture thing? I really dunno. So in order to get brownie points, because she would inevitably have some of mine, we went for grilled apples with ice cream. Preschooler nicked all the ice cream so I can’t speak for that, but man- those grilled apples were amazing. I’d say my favourite dessert of the year, and I have a pretty sweet tooth. It doesn’t look like a great thing from the photo (the apple element) but, I’m salivating now.

As a birthday kind of place, I’d say 100% recommended if you are a meat eater, there really wouldn’t be much point in coming if you were vegetarian, though they do have pasta on the menu and I can only imagine it is good. You definitely get what you pay for, and we didn’t feel hard done by. A great end to the most trying of years.

I have now officially eaten 52 different foods from around the world in Taipei, but I haven’t written them all up yet. Awesome, achievement unlocked!

Address: No. 1, Yumen Street, Zhongshan District, Taipei City, 10491

Best way to get there: Yuanshan MRT  on the red line. Maybe about 10minute walk across the expo park.