12 Days in Taiwan – Day 03 – Master of Mushroom

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Food next! The 13-minute drive to the Master of Mushroom saw us going uphill for a good stretch to an elevation of 500m+. By the time we reached the place, it was solidly during lunch hour — i.e., crowded — and we had to wait a good 30 minutes before a table was freed for us. There’s a shop beside the restaurant selling — you guessed it — pricey mushroom-based products that guests can browse while waiting for their tables.

Oddly, when we finally went to our assigned table, there were numerous other unoccupied tables in the seating hall too. Perhaps the restaurant had to size the areas correctly to optimize their wait staff coverage. The restaurant has several halls, some of which look somewhat enclosed and almost dank, but our allocated table was on a balcony verandah with a good view of the foliage downhill beside us, and very cooling to boot too.

The restaurant itself is famous for its hot pots, so we went with that for NTD960/SGD42, though they have a lot of other items on the menu. The actual lunch took a while to finally get started — it was an hour after arriving when we finally got to eat. And hot pots are not the kind of cuisine that you can stuff yourself with buffet-like speed. DIY cooking takes time LOL. Kong assured us that we didn’t need to hurry, but we decided not to take too much of our own sweet time at it as we still had two other places to check out for the rest of the day.

Mushroom products galore at the shop. Xinshe, the district where the restaurant is located, is important to Taiwan as its farms supply 70% of the mushrooms grown on the island.
There are little plastic boxes for food sampling: P would have happily devoured the contents of each container if we did not restrain him.
We had a fabulous table on a balcony overlooking foliage. If only we had more time to really enjoy lunch!
The literal translation of 菇神 should be Mushroom God, not Master of Mushroom. That was me OCD-ing.
Hot pots like these are foolproof cuisine and hard to go wrong.
I have a work colleague who, when he learned that I’m not a fan of hot pots in general, swore he would bring me to a good one in Singapore. Now I’m a convert!
Parking on the side of the restaurant is limited, but directly opposite it is a larger car park.

Next stop: a Grape Farm!