Monday, December 26, 2005

Champion Teppanyaki, Fremont

Slicing up shrimp

I've always hated Taiwanese localization of food, with the one exception of Taiwanese teppanyaki, which has usually been really good, be it done in Taipei or here in Silicon Valley. And I had pretty fond memories of when I came to this place about five years ago (46851 Warm Springs Blvd in Fremont, 510-770-0918).

But for some reason, tonight was a total bummer. The meal started with a number of Westernized plates, including a salad with some sort of mayonnaise dressing, lox sitting on a huge pile of onions, and "Russian" vegetable soup (sounds like Shashlik in Singapore?) with garlic bread. I didn't really care for any of these, but I was willing to sit through them in order to get to the main pieces of meat and bean sprouts that I remembered being so good. Unfortunately, even when we got to those, they were just so blah and boring. The seasoning was lacking, the sauces didn't help, and the fried rice was not the tasty grease bomb that I remembered.

Some bits left from my $24 Special Combination with Ribeye SteakWhat the heck happened to this place? Maybe it was just our chef, but this food was so bland and boring that it only reinforced my dislike for localized Taiwanese food rather than debunking it. Yuck. At least the ribeye was tender, but even the bean sprouts were boring. (On a quick side note, I heard that Kingswood in Cupertino has shut down.)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

oh no! No more hot pot at Kingswood!

bma said...

To clarify, I now found out that it was only the owner (and name?) that had changed at Kingswood. Apparently the hot pot and teppanyaki stations are still there, as are many of the staff. Can anyone confirm this?