Facing East--Taiwanese Restaurant

Last weekend my family and I went to try out Facing East Restaurant, a Taiwanese place located in Bellevue, WA.

 

Menu

I'm not 100% sure what some of the items are or are called  because my mother just ordered whatever off the menu along with what the waiter recommended since most of us have never been here.

 

We started off with the appetizer sort of items, such as...

 

side pork  with pickled veggie stuffed in a bun (like a burger ish)
this item was one of my favorites. it only comes with one bun order basically so we had to order about 5 of them to feed the table. It was nice and savory and had nice balance with the pickled veggies.

Bamboo shoot salad. Much different than any type of bamboo dish i've had. It is a cold dish and it has a mayonaise type of dressing. It had a very refreshing quality to it.

 

A sampler platter with konbu/kelp/seaweed on the left, chayedan (tea steeped hard boiled egg), which is one of my favorites, and steeped bean curd on the right (which has a very meat-like quality to it)

 

Literally in Chinese, this dish is called "good eating white rice." It basically has a bean and meat mixture that goes on top of the white rice along with slices of takuan (pickled radish). I loved this rice dish and found it not to salty and not to powerful in flavor so it could also compliment some of the other dishes.

This dish was a green onioin pancake layered with thin meat (pork I think) and cilantro and cucumber and rolled up. I had no complaints about this one. The presentation was nice and it tasted good.

 Now we have more of our dinner type of items.

This one translated is called "3 cups chicken" because it is supposed to use three cups each of soy sauce, sugar, and something else..maybe basil? I can't quite remember..but I've had this dish at other restaurants before and this one is up there amongst the other ones i've had that taste good.

This is a silken tofu dish with veggies and a thick sauce. It wasn't the best one I've had but it was still decent. Not much else to say about it since I didn't eat that much of it.

This is an Ong choy/chinese swamp cabbage with lamb dish. I liked the lamb in this more than the veggies. It was really tender and wasn't gamey.

This dish is bittermelon with salted duck egg. I like bittermelong especially when it's fried with eggs and vermicelli noodles. This one however was just way to bitter for me. Bittermelong does indeed have a sweetness that can come out of it if cooked right but this was just straight up bitter.




Two angles to this next dish. This was a large deep fried trout (steelhead I believe) with a sweet and savory sauce over it with veggies. This was really good. The fish wasn't dry on the inside from the frying and the batter wasn't too thick. The sauce complimented this perfectly. Plus,