I had my excursion in the San Gabriel Valley and changed directions and decided that instead of fish, I would like to try a Taiwanese oyster omelette because I love egg dishes.
We headed over to Huge Tree Pastry in Monterey Park, where I was eager to try the oyster omelette, as well as the soy milk that people seem to like. Alas, it was not to be. The place closes at 4:30 p.m. and we arrived around 4:10 p.m. and were told we could only order to go, which I was not interested in doing.
So we headed across the street to the Atlantic Times Square Mall where we ate at Nice Time Cafe, which according to its website “has served authentic Taiwanese cuisine to the San Gabriel Valley since 1988.”
The first thing of note was that the menu was huge. Kind of reminded me of a New York diner with a menu of a dozen pages and you wonder how everything could be possibly be good with a menu of that breadth.
We ordered oyster omelette, stinky tofu, bitter melon with tiny pieces of hard boiled egg whites and a fourth dish which if it had an English name, I did not catch it. The fourth dish (more about that below) was my favorite.
Let’s start with the stinky tofu. I hated it! And I was fascinated why I hated it because I couldn’t put my finger on exactly why I found it so noxious. It came in some sort of broth and had some sort of edible fungus in it. I’m not adverse to stinky foods – I love Japanese natto – but I literally found the tofu noxious and couldn’t eat it.
The oyster omelette was an interesting experience and since this was my first one, I have no idea where it ranked on the quality scale of oyster omelettes, but my dining companion, who was born and raised in Taiwan, said it was pretty typical Taiwanese oyster omelette. I wasn’t in love with it. The oysters were straight from a can and it was pretty un-eggy compared to an American or French omelette. The starch that apparently is used to hold the thing together gave it a weird and unpleasant texture in my opinion. The whole thing is topped with this very sweet sauce that was somewhat reminiscent of ketchup, only even sweeter. The only way I could eat the dish was to swipe off that sauce and then I doused it with the hot sauce on the table, which appalled my dining companion as he said that Taiwanese oyster omelette is definitely not eaten topped with hot sauce.
The bitter melon with hard boiled egg whites was boring and bland, but I have been on a health kick lately and bitter melon is really good for you, so it wasn’t a total loss. The dish was not inedible.
On to the fourth dish – the only one I really liked. This had small pieces of dry tofu, pig ears (which I didn’t eat since I do not eat pork - I picked around them), and lots of cilantro and some other spices that I couldn’t identify. It just had a nice herbaceous taste that reminded me somewhat of Vietnamese cuisine. My dining companion picked off the cilantro and left it on his plate, insisting that it was only for garnish and wasn’t supposed to be eaten, but I happily ate the cilantro.
Anyway, so many dishes on the menu at Nice Time Cafe that I think you could eat there everyday for a year and not eat them all.