What better way for the Hungry Chicken to start off Taipei posts than with a bestest Chicken themed restaurant?! The Chinese name, when directly translated, means “Egg Egg House”.

Tamago Ya is located right oustide the MRT subway station, in that plaza-like entrance to the Xi Men Ding night-market shopping-area. This fun 4-floor restaurant specializes in ketchup fried rice wrapped with scrambled eggs, otherwise known as omurice or omelette rice, which just so happens to be one of my favorite quick-n-easy simple Japanese dishes. (I know, eggs, ketchup, and rice sound weird, yes, but it’s really very good!)

Entrance:

At 6:30pm on a Sunday, there was a line outside Tamago Ya, and we had to wait about 10 minutes for a table. Everyone really loves cute chickens! During the short wait, we were given a menu with photos for every dish, so that we could easily and quickly decide what we wanted once seated. To keep all the waiting hungry chickens happy, they also served complimentary cups of iced tea.

Interior:

Everything inside is yellow, orange, and white, very consistent in Chicken style. The rooms glow with complete yellowness, and I wondered if my eyes would be blind to every other color after dinner!

For an extra NT$80, you can get a set meal with any main course, which includes soup, drink, and dessert.
There are several waiters on every floor, with headsets, and right after you order, the food starts coming within seconds.

Soup, iced tea, and orange juice.

Slightly spicy tomato veggie soup with some strips of ham. The orange juice tasted like an unfizzy sweet orange soda.

Thai style cod fish, salad, egg rice plate NT$250

For this special restaurant, Chicken (right) makes his photo debut on HungryChicken.org with another chicken friend! Welcome Chicken! They happily joined us for this meal.
On the far left, crispy fried soft cod with spicy tomato salsa. It tasted more Mexican than Thai, with lots of spicy chopped onions, tomatoes, and vinegar. It actually almost tasted like crispy chips and salsa! The pasta to the right was in a sweet tomato sauce.

Egg and rice close up.

This was a less conventional omurice. It was more a scoop of creamy soft rice fried with tomato sauce and ketchup, topped with a blanket of fluffy scrambled eggs fried with sweet butter. The eggs were juicy and glossy, and very lightly cooked.

Curry, croquette, egg rice NT$180

This was a true rice omelette, with a scrambled egg wrapped neatly around tomato fried rice. On top was a hash brown like vegetable croquette, breaded and fried mashed veggies. The slightly spicy sweet Japanese curry complemented the rice nicely.

Fried shrimp, pork, beef sauce, egg rice NT$270

Crunchy breaded and fried shrimp and pork with an extremely beefy tasting sauce. Tomato rice topped with buttery egg like the one on the cod fish plate.

For dessert:
Tamago Ya “Creme Brulee” (normally NT$60 if ordered separately from the set menu)

Super thick sticky smooth egg vanilla creme custard with the word “egg” written cutely in caramel. Chicken and friend were happy to pose beside it!

A few more shots of the restaurant:

Framed photos of the Tamago Ya chicken in various countries.


Tamago Ya chicken in New York!


The walls around the stairs: “Omelete Rice”


If you get takeout, you get to carry the food in chicken takeout boxes!!


Fun fun restaurant and fun fun food. The Hungry Chicken gives Tamago Ya a perfect 5 hungry chicken star rating. And no, I am not being biased!!….

total+tax= NT$960 (dinner for 3)

This entry was posted by chicken on Thursday, July 27th, 2006 at 11:21 am and is filed under Taipei, Central Taipei, Japanese. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.