OJT EATS | Qi Zhuan Ba Qi Izakaya
Izakayas are great. They are often described as the Japanese version of a pub and as much as we love a pub, izakayas are just different. The focus on food is perfect if you're greedy (like us) and the variety ranging from skewers to fried stuff to even really good sashimi along with beer and high balls just make for an amazing combination. We are forever looking for a new izakaya to try and so this week we decided to give Qi Zhuan Ba Qi a go.
We decided to start with a bunch of skewers. These were chicken thigh skewers with a thick later of mentaiko paste on top. The chicken was juicy and tender while mentaiko is just a massive hit of umami. An excellent start to the food.
Then we had scallion salt pork jowl. You can hardly see the pork jowl through all of that scallion but trust us, it was there and it was so good! It had that slightly crunchy texture you get from pork jowl but it was also really juicy and flavourful even without all the scallion! The scallion was then amazingly fragrant on top of it all.
These were chicken neck skewers. You may not think there is a lot of meat on chicken's neck and you would be right but what little there is is in fact very tasty. This place had marinated it with a sweetish sauce and had a little chilli powder on top as well which gave it the tiniest of kicks which was really nice.
Next it was onto a bit of sushi with their trio of seared salmon nigiri. You had just plain seared salmon, you had their signature caramel seared salmon and then finally you also had their mentaiko seared salmon. Honestly, all three were fantastic. but we were particularly impressed by the caramel one. We were worried that it would be too sweet but it actually worked really well with the salmon. We'd definitely recommend this!
Now onto a little bit of fried stuff, in this case, fried oysters. Similar to the fried oysters from last week's tonkatsu place, these were also fried excellently. The oysters were big and plump; delicious!
We also had some veggies; first up was a classic of izakayas in Taiwan, stir fried white water snowflake. It's a crunchy green vegetable that you can get pretty much in every izakaya in Taiwan and it must be pretty easy to cook as it is pretty reliably good everywhere and every time. This was no exception.
The other veggies we ordered was another Taiwan izakaya classic, baby corn. It comes griled in its own leaves. You have to test your asbestos hands to peel and then just dip them into a bit of a salt and pepper mix. It's super tasty with the hot crunchy corn with its natural sweetness and then seasoned with that salt and pepper mix, these are incredibly more-ish.
This was a really great little izakaya hidden away just behind Zhong Shan station on the 2nd floor, just above a ramen shop. We were recommended it by a friend but found out that it is pretty popular on google too (although it has a very long Chinese name with no English). We really enjoyed all of the food and will definitely be looking to come back!
Qi Zhuan Ba Qi Izakaya, 2F, No 25, Zhongshan N Road Section 1, Lane 140, ZhongShan District, Taipei
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