Le Palais - Taipei
A dining room full of mirrors
Rating: 16/20
Where: Taipei, Taiwan
When: Dinner for 2 on 15 January 2023
Cost: Tasting menu NT$3680-24880
Accolades: 3 Michelin Stars
Why: Traditional Chinese banquet cuisine, good service, huge portions
Le Palais is Taiwan's only three-star Michelin restaurant. Given its name, one might expect it to serve French food, but no, it’s all Chinese cuisine. The restaurant is located on the top floor of the Palais de Chine hotel near Taipei’s main train station. The hotel has five stars, but feels a bit old-school with extensive dark wooden paneling. Booking a room at the hotel is the easiest way to get a table at the restaurant: the concierge can make a reservation way before they become available online.
Taipei was our first stop on a long weekend trip to Asia. We arrived in the early morning and had breakfast at “Fuhang Soy Milk”, which was delicious, but maybe not the smartest decision given how substantial our dinner turned out to be.
Le Palais has a very extensive menu and your experience will probably differ a lot depending on what you order. There is a dim sum menu for lunch, and this is what people talk about when they say that Le Palais is one of the cheapest three-star restaurants in the world: you can really eat here for less than $10 (probably not a lot of food, but at least you've been here). Dinners can be enjoyed Chinese banquet style in one of several private dining rooms. For a larger party, ordering the restaurant's signature roast duck or goose makes sense (each is enough for 8-10 people, supposedly). We sat in the main dining room, and saw that all nearby tables ordered the roasted baby duck (for 3-4 people), which is finished table-side: doused with alcohol, lit on fire and then carved. Not being great fans of duck, and wanting to try a wider variety of dishes, we went for one of the many set menus that the restaurant offers. They range quite a bit in price from NT$3680 to 24880. We went for the most expensive menu, figuring that this would give the restaurant the best opportunity to shine. At that price point (over $900 including a mandatory service charge), Le Palais is actually one of the world's most expensive restaurants. Given this wide variety of prices and menus, a single visit cannot possibly result in a comprehensive review, so please take my conclusions in that spirit.
Our tasting menu included a pairing of four different teas: one cold, three hot and all of them pretty good. I particularly liked the tea served with the desserts, a green tea that had been fermented inside a citrus fruit. One white wine and one red wine (both Italian) were available by the glass, but neither of them was particularly impressive. I'd suggest sticking with the tea pairing or ordering a bottle if you really “need” wine.
Just before the start of our tasting menu, we received a shot glass containing mountain flower vinegar. It was a refreshing mix of sweet and sour, like sugar water mixed with vinegar 17. Oddly, during the entire dinner the empty shot glass remained on our table, maybe a subtle admonition that we were supposed to sip on it rather than drink it in one go? Oops, too late!
Our first course was a collection of four appetizers. "Shrimp toast" had some lovely shrimp on a base of freshly fried, warm, crunchy dough. Not a "small" appetizer by any means, but the "toast" was remarkably light and airy, and not very oily. The provided sweet and sour dipping sauce was also very nice 17. A slice of the restaurant's signature BBQ pork was served only slightly warm, and sadly was very light in BBQ flavor and not particularly tender 15. My kind-of-pescatarian wife had some yellow wine marinated chicken instead. Served at room temperature, the chicken tasted overcooked and slightly mealy to me, with the yellow wine giving it a slightly odd aftertaste 15. A roll of spinach wrapped in tofu was served cold. The tofu had an interesting spongy texture (tofu skin this was not), but virtually no taste. Same for the spinach, so with no seasoning detectable, this made for a very low-on-flavor, but presumably very healthy dish 14. Finally, a radish pickled with vinegar was quite sweet, making me long for the sour pickled version popular in Japan 13.
Next up was a whole lobster served in a sauce made from chicken broth, scallions and cubes of ginger. If the words "whole lobster" weren't already a giveaway: this was a HUGE portion - maybe a one pound lobster per person. As course two (out of nine) this was clearly a warning shot about the total amount of food to expect tonight. The lobster was pre-cut, with the head and tail subsequently de-shelled by the kitchen, resulting in a minimum of messiness for us. The crustacean was good, but on the well-done end of possible preparations. Its head (probably expectedly) had a bit of an aftertaste and a less meaty texture. Truly outstanding however was the savory sauce, it elevated the whole dish and I wished that there had been more of it. The intensely-flavored ginger cubes went really well with the lobster, and cut a bit through the heaviness of the dish 17.
Thankfully, a lighter course followed: soup. A clear broth contained some lily bulbs and a huge piece of fish maw. The broth was delightful, flavorful and fragrant, with an intensity somewhere between light Japanese and stronger Western soups. By itself this might have rated a 18 (or even 19 if you asked my wife). But we weren't as big fans of the other (admittedly luxurious) ingredients. The lily bulbs were crumbly and starchy, texture-wise in-between a potato and a chestnut, but with very little flavor by themselves. The fish maw (which is a misleading name for the fish’s swim bladder) didn't taste of much either, it was quite gelatinous and a bit sticky. I can see why you would use these two textures (lily bulb and fish maw) to complement each other, but frankly, the broth really didn't need either of them 16.
Our next dish was finished and plated table-side, supposedly to ensure an optimal serving temperature. Japanese abalone was served in a rich sauce made from chicken broth, Iberico ham and pork. Along for the ride were a piece of Japanese shiitake mushroom, a goose foot and a bulb of a local Taiwanese herb. The abalone was unfortunately the worst thing on the plate: extremely tough and without much flavor (or a fishy taste according to my wife, which is not necessarily better) - a 13 or 14 if rated individually. Thankfully, the other components of the dish were better: the mushroom juicy and flavorful, the goose foot cooked very tender so that it essentially fell off the bone(s), even the connective tissue was quite soft, and the herb bulb was delightfully crunchy and fresh. All was brought together by an excellent thick and savory sauce. It almost made up for the abalone 16.
A deconstructed Wagyu beef stir fry came next. "Deconstructed" since all of the components were served separately with only a hint of sauce on the beef cubes and mushrooms. The vegetables were all cold, and tasted fine except for the mushrooms which seemed a bit off. The Wagyu was cooked medium-rare, and was quite fatty, but it went well with the crispy garlic chips, the dollop of wasabi and the grilled baby onion 17.
The pescatarian replacement for the wagyu was half of a steamed crab. It was nicely done, and a bit sweet. The ginger/pepper dipping sauce was quite vinegary 16.
My favorite dish of the night followed: a steamed sea bass filet was filled with fermented mustard leaves, and was served with a sauce made from soy sauce and the juice left over from steaming the fish. A braised daikon slice was hidden underneath the fish. The sea bass was lovely: buttery, tender, and the mustard greens were a nice umami addition. The sauce was excellent as well, fatty, and maybe a tad too salty, but that's nitpicking 18.
One of the signature dishes of the kitchen concluded the savory portion of our meal. A white gourd had been stuffed with scallops and crab meat, and then steamed for 6-8 hours. Served over a chicken and pork broth, this was billed as a traditional, but labor-intensive, Cantonese dish. Unfortunately, it was a step down from what came before. The gourd and the crab meat didn't taste of much, especially compared to the sauce and what seemed like chicken crumbles. The sauce was thick and generally fine, but not as good as the sauce that we had with the abalone. A baby bok choy cut into a flower shape freshened up the dish 16. My wife would have rated this a 15.
On to desserts, and the first one was actually more Western than Chinese. A freshly fried dough pocket was dusted with powdered sugar and filled with cheese, a mix of mozzarella and cheddar, to be precise. The cheese had followed gravity to the bottom of the pocket, so what started out as a very sweet, perfectly fried dough at the top ended up mostly savory (and much heavier) at the bottom. Without the cheese, this would have been an 18, a near perfect dessert, but with the cheese, it felt a bit too heavy after such a substantial dinner 17.
The second and final dessert was lighter: a jujube red date soup containing a bird's nest. The piping hot, slightly sweet soup was delicious, it almost tasted like it contained a bit of liquor (for better or worse). The bird's nest just added some texture (and mythical health benefits, I suppose) 17.
Overall: This was an enjoyable meal with friendly service. My main gripe is actually not with the quality of the food, but with its quantity, which was enough to easily feed two people on a single tasting menu. Maybe that's what the high price point buys you, but it verged on the absurd.
Focusing on how good the dishes were: well, a couple of them were outstanding, but sadly, they were in the minority. Most courses were fine, but I've had plenty of Chinese food at local non-Michelin-starred restaurants that was equally good or better. To be fair, Le Palais had more fancy ingredients, such as fish maw, goose foot, and bird’s nest, but I have to admit that I’m not a big fan of any of those. So for the price point, this was an exceedingly poor bang for the buck.
Finally, a more apples-to-apples comparison of Michelin three-starred Chinese restaurants. I much preferred Lung King Heen in Hong Kong (maybe an 18 had I rated restaurants back in 2011), and liked Tang Court, also in Hong Kong, slightly better as well (17). Le Palais is, at least for the set menu that we tried, not worth a special journey 16.
