This is called 'Meat-Shaped Stone'. It was awful. Described as a glistening piece of Dongpo pork selected from the best pig knuckle known for its layers of fat and tastiness, served over a bed of Shanghainese vegetable noodles. It tasted like gooey gelatinous porky soap.
Here it is decunstructed. We kind of just pushed it around the plate all evening.
This is a replica of the Ch'ing Dynasty Jadeite Cabbage with Insects. This edible version was made with this sad looking bokchoy sum (Chinese cabbage heart) and a lonely shriveled shrimp representing the 'insects'. Nobody could finish theirs.
Oh God... okay this was 'Buddha's Tureen in Ting Cauldron with String Decoration' also known as 'Buddha jumps over the wall'. Apparently this soup is highly complex and takes two days to create. Made with quail eggs, bamboo shoots, scallops, sea cucumbers, abalone, pork tendon, Jinhua ham, mushrooms and taro, stewed in a chicken broth then topped with supreme shark fin. The name implies that Buddha himself would sneak over a wall to get a taste of it even though he was a vegetarian. It was so bland that we were ready to jump off a wall to get away from it.
Another monotone soup. I don't know how they managed to make everything so beige-tasting.
When this serious-looking dude arrived with Peking duck things started to look up!
... and up! This looks good right?
Well this is what happened to it. They wrapped the duck slices in some sort of bland rice pancake with a sad piece of red pepper and non descript sauce.
This was okay. Bean curd, sea bass in generic soy-based sauce.
This was the dessert platter. Um, not much to say about it... just many varieties of unsweetened formations made from bean or gelatin.
I guess we had to have one bad meal on this trip, and of course it was at the fanciest place. The Silks Palace restaurant is attached to the National Palace Museum so the venue was really nice and tres upscale. Some of the dishes shown above are edible replicas of Chinese artifacts - so weird. It was all prim and proper with servers coming in and bowing out of the room.. but it was all too much and the food was so awful.. William and I got the giggles and couldn't stop so we had to tell them we were elated from the royal food.
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