Eating Out: [台中市] 何記東勢李炒手 (He Ji Hakka Style Cuisine, Taichung, Taiwan)

Some close family friends insisted on taking us to He Ji, one of their favorite Hakka-style cuisine restaurants on the outskirts of Taichung City. Hakka cuisine is hard to come by in the U.S., they wanted give me the opportunity to experience it firsthand.

Hakka cuisine is usually characterized by the use of bold, strong flavors (you’ll find a lot of ginger, pickled vegetables, garlic, peppers, and sour, savory and umami-ish flavors going on), with more of an emphasis on the heartiness of the food and less an emphasis on the aesthetic quality of presentation. For this reason, my family members, believing that my “delicate American constitution” would be offended by the supposedly crude presentation of the food, assuring me again and again that the food that I was about to experience was going to be delicious. Little did they know that I don’t really place too much importance on presentation; I believe all food, when prepared with love and care, is beautiful . . . Besides, there’s nothing I hate more than tucking into beautifully plated dish and discovering that it’s actually bad tasting! I hate to think that all the time and effort put into plating a dish like that could have been put towards actually making the food taste good . . . but that’s a story for another day.

When we arrived, a bowl of freshly pan-fried peanuts arrived on our table. Still hot, and liberally dusted with salt, garlic and fried peppers, this fragrant dish served to open our appetite.

Boiled chicken: cuts of moist dark meat served with two different dipping sauces (a sweeter, hoisin type sauce and a punchy garlic sauce). Taiwanese prefer to eat dark meat when it comes to poultry, finding its moistness superior to that of leaner white meat. When asked what part of the chicken I usually eat in the US and hearing I eat chicken breast, most of my relatives will twist up their noses and say “Isn’t that so dry and tasteless?”

My favorite dish: Sauteed pig intestines with bittermelon. You either hate or love this one for obvious reasons. I love anything offal/stinky so this dish was right up my alley. The sauce was delicious; pleasantly sour from the use of pickled vegetables and white vinegar, bitter from the melon and spicy from the use of ginger to cut down on the pig intestine’s “stinky” aroma. I probably ate half of this dish all by myself.

More sauteed bittermelon: This time, sauteed with peppers and garlic. Delicious if you like bittermelon, offensive if you don’t.

Pork with a topping of fried shallots and garlic: Very thinly sliced pork, some with just the meat, some with just the skin. Topped with a sauce of made with soy sauce, garlic and shallots, this dish had a million different textures going on at the same time: chewiness from the pork skin, crispness of the fried topping, tenderness from the pork meat. You’d think that with the sauce this dish would have the potential to be oversalted and heavy, but it wasn’t. This dish showed that the chef here was truly talented.

Sauteed eggplant with basil, garlic and peppers: Most people would recognize this from Panda Express and similar fast-food Chinese or Thai eateries in the states. Always greasy and delicious; I don’t think I need to elaborate on this one . . .

Steamed fish in a soy-sauce based broth: The fish was extremely fresh; many of my family members marvelled at how “sweet” it tasted. The sauce is delicious on its own as well; had I a bowl of rice, I would have just mixed the sauce into it and eaten it just is.

Sauteed leeks with tofu, 木耳 (Wood Ear mushrooms), pork skin, and peppers: Again, a lot of textural contrast, chewy, crunchy and tender. The sauce here was also soy-sauce and garlic-based and very savory.

I believe that there was also a couple of other dishes that I missed:

• drunken chicken
• miso soup with wakame seaweed and fish
• beef stomach and intestines in a ginger-basil broth
• sizzling stone plate of butter-sauteed beef with green peppers and caramelized onions

But by this time I was so full I couldn’t eat anymore; let alone take pictures! I think I was food-comaing by this point already.

何記東勢李炒手
台中市福林路45號
04-2461-2312
04-2461-7217

He Ji Hakka Style Cuisine
No. 45, Fulin Road, Taichung City, Taiwan
04-2461-2312
04-2461-7217