Review: 土魠魚羹 (thick soup with deep fried mackerel fish) - Kaohsiung

Today was the day when we met up with my parents and ventured around Kaohsiung together.  It was also the day when we moved to the hotel where my sister was having her wedding.   We stayed at the Ambassador Hotel in Kaohsiung, which is a very nice hotel.  It's located right by the river, and every night there's a light & fountain show at the hotel.  LOL.  

However, there weren't too many things around that area during the day.  It's somewhat located in a financial district, not too many restaurants within walking distance.   During the evening, however, there was some kind of a food festival right across the river (walking the distance).  If you look closely at the picture below, the food festival is closer to the left hand side of the picture, and along the river, where you see lots of lights and stalls.  Apparently if you were out by the river during the light show, there's also loud music accompanying the light show.  

Earlier that afternoon, we walked around the neighbourhood to look for something to eat.  As expected, there weren't too many restaurants so we continued walking around the area.  We stumbled upon this place below on the side of the street and was intrigued with the dish.  It wasn't something that we had tried before; we didn't even know what this dish was.  However, what we COULD see from the food cart was some kind of a deep fried thing, and we were sold.  LOL.  I'm telling you, it's really easy to lure us in; just give us something deep fried.  

After doing some Google search, looks like the name of this dish is thick soup with deep fried mackerel fish.   It also had some rice noodles in the soup.  The soup itself was slightly tangy (I assumed it was from vinegar) and as the name says, the soup was thicker and somewhat slimy.  The deep fried fish, although I'm not really sure if it was in fact mackerel, was nice and crispy even after it's been mixed with the soup.  The person who was serving us was really nice and she successfully deciphered our body language when ordering since there was no English menu 😁

In addition to the soup, my parents was craving more side dishes, and they ended up ordering a mixed-meat plate from a food stall next door!  I am not sure what was in the plate, but i think it had:  marinated egg, pig's ears, marinated tofu, pork's blood, a bunch of random non-descript innards (😆 sorry to be so vague but seriously there was just a bunch of innards on that plate), topped beautifully with chillies and green onions.   

I only tried a couple of bites from this plate but my parents seemed to like it, in addition to the very-very-very-reasonable price for this plate compared to prices in Indonesia or Vancouver.  They were a happy camper!  

Afterwards, we stopped by a small cafe around the block to have coffee, and then headed back to the hotel afterwards to chill for the rest of the afternoon.  Our evening that day was spent for a big family dinner prior to the wedding.  We booked a private space at a restaurant and had a full on wedding-style meals (you know... those 10-course meals, with crab ball on a crab claw, and then finished with heaping bowl of fried rice, and you go home with a love handle that wasn't there before).   

To close the night, I bought a beer from 7-Eleven and went to bed early since the next day was the wedding day!  Oh, but wait.... I didn't even make it through the night before I started making my multiple trips to the bathroom.  LOL.  It's definitely a great thing that we had already moved to this hotel because the bathroom was so nice and big and clean, and I didn't mind the slightest bit spending a few hours in there.  HAHAHAHA.   I ended up drinking lots of Pocari Sweat and eating plain white bread from 7-Eleven throughout the night to make sure that I would still get energy the next morning for the wedding.  I miraculously survived without a hitch by the next morning 👌.  

So the next day was basically my sister's wedding, so we spent our afternoon at the wedding venue and had a very luxurious wedding banquet meal.  The wedding ended around 4-ish pm.   We had a bit of time to take our faces off (read: wipe off our make up) and chill for a bit, and then off we went for dinner.  However, I ended up running out of energy after we got to the dinner place, probably because I couldn't eat much during the day because of the food poisoning.  So we ducked out of the after-wedding dinner and tucked in early for the night!   

I was fully revived after a night of Norit, plain white bread, and pocari sweat.  LOL.  Thank goodness for my immune system.  We had an amazing breakfast buffet at the hotel where we tried a few different Taiwanese breakfast menu.  Shortly after, we were off to the train station to go to Taipei!   Get ready, the next posts will be full of culinary experiences in Taipei :)