Birthday in Taipei day 2: No egg no life

In spite of her moniker, Hello Kitty's favorite Sanrio character is, in fact, NOT Hello Kitty (ハロー・キティ) but Gudetama (ぐでたま).  I have, for better or for worse, been infected with her affinity to the lazy egg with an orange ass.  When I found out there was a Gudetama Chef (蛋黃哥五星主廚餐廳) in Taipei, we put it on our list of places to visit.  We couldn't get ourselves a table back in March, but thankfully the restaurant was no longer crazily busy these days, and I managed to book myself a table online a couple of days ago.

We arrived a few minutes after our appointed time of 11:20 a.m. to find the restaurant about half full. Being a theme restaurant, it's no surprise that Gudetama is EVERYWHERE.  It's a case of 小巫見大巫 comparing Hello Kitty Chinese Cuisine (Hello Kitty中菜軒) to this place...

We decided to order 3 dishes, which turned out to be one too many... Then we proceeded to go around the place snapping pictures of the decorations - the same thing that everyone else was doing when they arrived.

Japanese yakiniku with rice (日式燒肉飯) - instead of bacon, Gudetama now uses yakiniku as his/her blanket.  Still very cute.  The flavors here were OK, and it's more about the look than the taste.  The yakiniku sauce in the egg shell-shaped bowl has a little garlicky kick.

Too lazy to think deep-fried platter (懶得想炸物拼盤) - this was a pretty damn big platter.  The two halves of the boiled egg were wrapped in ham and deep-fried - almost like Scotch eggs.  The French fries were sprinkled with dried herbs, and the deep-fried chicken tenders were, in fact, tender.  The fried chicken was drizzled with a herb mayo, and were succulent and delicious.

Then there were the sausages.  Not quite Taiwanese in style, they nevertheless veered slightly towards the sweet side.  The most interesting part was that they were form around pieces of pork rib bones.  There was also a squid ink sausage, which was pretty nice.

Korean kimchi and rice cake pizza (韓式泡菜年糕 pizza) - thinking we needed a third dish, I deliberated over the choice of pizza before settling on this one.  Interesting with the acidity and the spiciness of kimchi, along with the chewy texture of Korean tteok (떡) rice cake.

A little cheezy... The only problem was that the texture of the rice cakes wasn't consistent - some were soft and chewy, while others were a little dry and tough.

Iced latte with marshmallow (棉花糖拿鐵) - I needed an excuse to get my "morning" coffee, so I got myself an iced latte... with a Gudetama marshallow on top.

We only sampled a small number of dishes today, but honestly the food wasn't bad.  Zero fails out of three dishes, and some of the items on that platter were pretty damn delicious.  For a theme restaurant where food isn't really the focus, what's there to complain about?