What We Ate In Taiwan, Part 3 -- Evergreen Resort Hotel Buffet

Having taken a number of tours over the years organized by Chinese tour companies in both California and Canada, the daily breakfast buffet and occasional dinner buffet at the tour's hotel stop typically provided the culinary highlights of the tour because the restaurant meals provided on these tours were largely forgettable.  A fairly common assessment of these restaurant lunches and dinners is a lack of quality and variety, with seemingly the same rice, cabbage, scrambled eggs, soup and watermelon at each stop.  In the same manner that some people characterized disco music as one song being played continuously, the Chinese food on the typical tour has been widely described as like eating the same meal every day even though you were in a different city.  Against that backdrop, since even the most economical Chinese tours stay primarily at four star hotels, the accompanying buffets provide a welcome contrast, both in the context of food quality and variety, and the ability to fill up your tank.

However, on our Taiwan tour with Supera/Signet (www.superatours.com), the hotel buffet meals paled compared to our restaurant meals, not because the hotel buffets were inferior, but because the restaurant meals were so good and interesting.  But this is not to say that the buffet meals on the tour weren't worth mentioning.  To the contrary many of them were also memorable, such as our first road stop at the Evergreen Resort Hotel.

The hotel had a nice buffet which I thought a bit reminiscent of Las Vegas.  It had a fruit and vegetable smoothie bar, a shaved ice bar, Haagen Dazs self serve, a noodle soup station, two kinds of self-serve beer and a refrigerator of canned Chinese drinks.   Interesting dishes included stir fried pork with cuttlefish.

Ham siu mai.

Crab cakes.

This wasn't what I expected when I saw the sign that said "cornbread."  This was actually a danish topped with cream corn.

Everybody's favorite, the hot dog Danish.

And just to prove I wasn't lying about the buffet beer.

Other interesting items included shark, tofu thread salad, and quinoa jook.  On any other Chinese tour the Evergreen buffet would have been a highlight.  It was really enjoyable.