Michella Jade Weng 翁郁容ミシェラ・オング: Bistro le Pont

Tuesday 18 May 2010

Bistro le Pont

How do you feel about eating pasta with chopsticks? Or having sushi with a fork? Kind of weird? Kind of fun? Yes, maybe sometimes. Provided that the pasta or the sushi is good, right?

If you're looking for that similar, funny feeling, Bistro le Pont in Taipei's Yongkang Street area may be a place to try out next.

The setting is a French bistro, but the restaurant owners are from Kaohsiung, and they feature goose-related food you're more likely to find at a night market or on some dirty street corner, served on flimsy tables made of stainless steel with matching rusty stools or creaky wooden benches for people to sit on, eat quickly and leave.

The food at Bistro le Pont is decent, and so are the prices (of course not as incredibly cheap as your neighborhood hawker). P-chan highly recommended the rice with goose fat (we got the luxurious version of that, with stir-fried scallop toppings) and the goose blood rice cake. They were pretty OK. I think I've had better goose, but this place was more than acceptable. Just about everything is served in plates with the pink rose trim you'd see at any street corner place, but with nice chopsticks. The surprise of the night was the lychee beer. That was really interesting. It tasted like lychee cider with a hint of hops.

The story behind the restaurant (as told to me by P-chan).
The original store is like any other goose food place, and it's in Kaohsiung. When it was time for the kids to take over, the kids felt they wanted to climb the food chain, wanted to be more classy and international. So they came to Taipei, opened up shop in the touristy Yongkang Street area, and put their food in a French bistro type place, complete with songs like "La Vie En Rose" playing in the background. The menu is in Chinese and French, the price listed in Taiwan Dollars and Euros. There are also "fusion" items like thick cut potatoes fried in goose fat.

In one word, 妙。