A very popular fancy Japanese restaurant.

Mitsui’s entrance:

I took this photo after dinner when it was closing, but usually the signs above the restaurant are lit up and bright green.

Right when I entered, I was greeted by gigantic king crabs!


Mitsui offers several different seating areas:

The main room near the entrance is largest and has many tables. We made a reservation only a few hours before, and as it was a holiday that day (father’s day) we were seated at the bar since there were no more tables available. Later we were moved to a more private dining area (right photo) when someone cancelled their reservation. This particular room/area had only 2 tables and the lighting was very dark with bright spotlights. There are also full rooms available for one big table. Those seemed to be more traditional in decor, with light yellow wood, and cloth curtained doorways.

On to the food!

Sashimi (Deluxe) NT$450

Big thick pieces of soft and fresh fish served on ice. I can’t remember the last time I had sashimi on ice, but I really liked the extra cold temperature. The light yellow thing in the front center that looks like a piece of chicken tasted very fishy and was very chewy. I’m not sure what it was? Maybe sea urchin? The shrimp was also raw and fishy.

Seaweed Vinegar NT$100

When I ordered this, I thought it would be a seaweed salad. Instead: super slimy thin noodle like seaweed in a vinegar sauce that tasted a bit like flowers. There’s no other way to eat this but to slurp it all up real fast. Topped with some normal salmon roe.

Deep-fried Prawn & Vegetable Sushi NT$250

Big rice rolled around shrimp tempura and crispy veggies like lettuce, cucumber and asparagus. Not much flavor, like a fresh salad or veggie summer roll.

Miso Soup NT$50 (right) and Seaweed Soup NT$50

Normal miso soup with soft cubes of tofu. The other soup was a clear soup flavored with thin strips of ginger and seaweed.

Toro Hand Roll NT$120 each

Crisp seaweed wrapped around super ice cold soft fish, rice and wasabi. The toro seemed chunky like it was ground up, and was a bit fishy. As the service was pretty quick, we had a lot of food on the table when this came, and were told twice by the waiters that we must eat this first! The fish was so icy cold it seemed almost frozen with ice crystals…it was ok.

Japanese Cold Noodle NT$250

Cold chewy noodles on a bed of ice, a glass of bonito flavored soy sauce, and some spicy powder. On top of the noodles was a nice big piece of soft meaty king crab, thin hair-like crispy seaweed, cucumbers, and two slices of egg omelette.

Beneath the cherry in the above photo, was a twirl of:

thin strips of flavorless crispy radish in a very slimy, snotty, sticky, saliva like goo. The entire thing was flavorless and really resembled sticky saliva!

We also ordered one of their set menus, the Seasonal Set NT$2,200, which came with 8 dishes and dessert. When you order one of their set menus, the waiter will ask you what you like and they will “design” a meal just for you. For example, if you don’t like eel, or beef, or you really like something, they’ll switch around dishes for you.

Salad.

Chilled chewy lobster, seaweed (the normal green kind in seaweed salads), asparagus, lettuce, a cherry, sliced corn, and apple, in a light soy wasabi dressing.

Salmon nigiri.

We couldn’t tell if this was meat or fish at first because of the brown color. It was very very melty soft, lightly cooked salmon on rice.

Eel roll (3 pieces).

Soft pieces of cooked eel, crunchy daikon, wrapped in a thin transparent tofu skin. Drizzled with a sweet ginger soy sauce.

Sashimi.

Very much like the sashimi we ordered separately. This one came with a soft scallop instead of the fishy yellow thing.

Wild Kinki fish from Hokkaido.

Really soft buttery white fish, a small crunchy bamboo shoot, and soft yam in a sweet and sticky soy sauce. I had never had Kinki fish before, and asked one of the many many waiters about it, who nicely and obediently ran back and forth to ask for us.

Grilled Golden King Crab leg.

The crab was on a bowl of salt crystals and a heated black rock to keep it warm. The crab meat itself was soft and pretty good, but normal, and in a shell that was grilled to a crisp and easily peeled off. The little nuts to the left, I thought were pistachios, but inside each was a brown colored soft bean like thing that was extremely bitter! As a comparison, the grilled golden king crab legs on the menu, if ordered separately, were $NT280 per 100 g.

Grilled Kobe Beef.

Really chewy and juicy cubes of steak with black pepper and soy sauce for dipping.

Close up of the beef.

It looked so nice and juicy that the hungry chicken snuck in a little bite!

Scallop and Papaya roast.

A big soft meaty scallop placed in the center of a piece of hollowed out juicy papaya. Roasted with a creamy melty cheesy sauce on top. The papaya flavors were really strong, good for papaya fans!

Desserts were included for everyone! We tried one of each that were offered. The ice creams are also homemade in the restaurant kitchen.

Green Tea Ice Cream.

Really rich, creamy, and soft milky ice cream with a sweet green tea taste. This was the first dessert that I tried, and there wasn’t much bitter sandy aftertaste, typical of most green tea ice creams. I really liked it! However, after tasting the super sweet vanilla ice cream (below), it became very bitter and normal when I went back to it!

Purple Rice and Red Bean.

Sweet red bean soup with purple rice and coconut flavors. Like the toro, the waiters instructed us to eat the fruit first or we wouldn’t be able to taste them after the sweet desserts! Very true, as the fruit were pretty tasteless. Plain crunchy peach, soft juicy kiwi, and a grape.

Vanilla Ice Cream.

Also very soft and creamy, seated on top of some crunchy frosted flakes. The vanilla flavor was a little strange, almost artificial, a bit fruity, but very sweet nonetheless.

Mitsui is what you would expect of a fancy Japanese restaurant. Fresh seafood and all the basics you could think of, carefully prepared and presented in neat dishes.

There is also another Mitsui right next door, which is the same exact restaurant but with more boring interior decoration and a much quieter atmosphere.

total+tax= NT$3949 (dinner for 3)

This entry was posted by chicken on Wednesday, September 13th, 2006 at 11:50 pm and is filed under Taipei, Central Taipei, Japanese. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.