taipei eats: dill herbs restaurant

Hello! It's been almost three months since my last blog post, and that whole "I'm gonna bake every weekend and blog about it" plan kind of went down the drain...I mean I had been baking, but just never got around around to blogging for some reason. 

So here I am trying to ease back into blogging with a review of Dill Herbs Restaurant! My mom had been eying this place for a while, and though she never declared out loud, from our daily conversations regarding what to eat for lunch/dinner (a constant dilemma in our household) for the past two weeks, I could tell she really wanted to eat out--specifically here. 

 

  

Dill Herbs Restaurant has an earthy and modern decor with a country style twist. There's enough room for my baby sister's giant stroller to navigate through, so that's always a plus for us :) I find it pretty nifty when restaurants chalk up one of their walls, especially if it's a recipe (even though this one is just how to cook pasta). There's also a shelf stocked full of fresh produce you pass by on the way to the restroom.

 

 

 

Anyways, on to the food. 

Despite the fairly good reviews I've read, I didn't find the meal that satisfying. I had already half expected the food to not taste as good as it looked, so I wasn't exactly disappointed, but throughout the course something always felt to be missing--something as minute as a certain flavor or texture that would have made the impact I was looking for had it been there. 

 My mom and I both ordered the 5-course meal, which consisted of bread, soup or salad, a main course, beverage, and dessert of choice. The bread was fluffy and soft, with an earthy herb and slightly garlic flavor, served warm with tomato salsa and olive oil balsamic vinegar dip.

My mom ordered the Caesar Salad with Smoked Chicken, and I ordered the salad of the day which turned out to be a fruit salad. They already had a fruit salad on the menu, so I'm not sure if it was any different, but it was a simple and nice start for lunch, but as most salads are in Taiwan--constructed 80% romaine lettuce--it was pretty plain to me.

Okay, maybe I should lower my expectations for salads here, but still!

 

This was my mom's Spaghetti with Seafood and Tomato Sauce, with a bit of freshly grated cheese on top. The spaghetti was a bit undercooked, and thus the texture did not pair well at all with the tomato sauce, which wasn't too bad (though a bit too watery for my liking).

And my main course was the Fresh and Smoked Salmon Tart with Tomato Salsa. The tart is made with one slice of smoked salmon as the base, a mix of diced tomatoes, mangoes, and pineapples with chunks of cooked salmon dressed in a creamy yogurt herb sauce as the core, and topped with leafy greens.  

The dish was light and the yogurt sauce wasn't overbearing as some cream sauces can be. It paired nicely with the fruit and salmon chunks, and made for a tasty dressing (and bread dip) on its own.

There was a dollop of the yogurt sauce on the side topped with mini sour fruit balls...? They tasted like mango and berry flavored popping boba, kind of a whimsical and albeit random addition to the dish, but interesting!

The tomato salsa was the same as the one served in the beginning to pair with the herb bread. 

As for dessert, my mom and I both ordered the dessert of the day, which was a mango mousse cake. 

ABOUT THIS DESSERT...

I'm sorry. Maybe I do have too high of expectations (I'm pretty sure I do), ESPECIALLY when it comes to dessert, but this mango mousse cake was rather disappointing :( It looks pretty and cute and all and even comes with a dainty little fork to eat it with, but as a dessert I personally felt there were more misses than hits. 

The mango mousse layers tasted nothing like mango. There was probably a hint of the fruit flavoring, but barely noticeable and no. If no one told me this was a mango mousse cake (aside from the color) I would have guessed it was just a plain cream cake. The sponge cake layers were a bit dry and had a texture more like bread than cake, or to put it in a worse, it tasted like day-old cake that was left out in the open. 

 

And we paired our sad mango mousse cakes with my mom's tasteless watery fruit tea and my fresh fruit and vegetable juice that really just tasted like watered down orange juice with lots of pulp.

 

The 5-course meal was pretty filling, and though the food wasn't fantastic--and we probably won't come here again--I feel we came more for the ambiance than for the food this time. In light of the earthy decor, with oldies music rolling and light rain pattering outside, the overall luncheon experience was soothing and pleasant, taste buds not involved, that is.