Chocoholic
As soon as I saw the sign, I knew this was the café for me. The clock projected on the back wall, the aged wooden tables, and the displays of old-style hot chocolate carafes, gave this a café a certain distinguishing quality without becoming kitschy. Indecisive about whether to get Italian hot chocolate or French hot chocolate, I asked the waitress to illuminate the differences. Expecting a short, non-descript answer, I was pleasantly surprised when she explained the milk-to-cocoa ratio, sweetness, thickness, and flavor differences between the two. But a few minutes later I was happily sipping on the Italian hot chocolate--a more cocoa-heavy hot chocolate with less milk to lighten the taste--as my friends, too, satisfied their own chocolate cravings.
Dazzling Café: Mint*
When I first walked into this cafe I thought I had entered an edible version of Tiffany's. It was not just the signature robin's egg blue that gave Dazzling Cafe's "Mint" branch this feeling; it was also the shining silver, fake-crystal handle bars, and gleaming white surfaces that made this place look bedazzled and expensive.
My earl grey milk tea was thick and rich, and my friends’ drinks were equally lavish. We also ordered honey toast--a dessert we had been seeking since arriving in Taipei. This is no ordinary piece of toast, but rather a block of bread cut into cubes, smothered in butter, and then toasted to the perfect toasty-outside-doughy-inside that you get right before bread starts to golden too deeply. Then the fun begins in choosing your toppings of choice. While you can choose highlights such as strawberries, nuts and caramel, or bananas and chocolate, your honey toast is always accompanied by a scoop of ice cream. My friend and I chose a Honey Toast with bananas and vanilla ice cream (which originally had nuts and chocolate sauce but were nixed due to allergies). The combination of slow-melting, vanilla-bean ice cream and warm, buttered toast made for a carboholic, dessert-lover's dream.
While I would recommend this restaurant based on its food and decor, I would caution against its pretension. Apparently famous enough to sometimes have a wait, Dazzling Cafe capitalizes on its popularity by imposing a 90 minute dining limit and 1 drink per person minimum on its customers. The prices (160 Taiwanese Dollars for a pot of milk tea and 220 for the honey toast), while not overly expensive for Taipei's restaurant scene, are still worthy of "special treat" status. While my friend would argue that the cafe's pretension adds to its attraction and "glamour appeal", I would argue that there is always another food option somewhere out there that is just as good if not better. All in all, this is a unique (and delicious) dining experience that I would recommend, but if I were living in Taipei I would hardly become a regular here.
*There are two Dazzling Cafés: Mint and Pink
Urban Core Cafe
This IKEA style cafe, written up in Lonely Planet, offered a nice hideout during a particularly heavy downpour. My friend's hot chocolate came steaming in a big, white mug with three large marshmallows floating atop the froth. My cheesecake, though better than anything of its kind that I've sampled in mainland China, was frozen in the middle and lacking in both physical and flavorful depth. Nonetheless, this cafe will do for a place to sip some tea or coffee while reading, chatting, or typing your way through bad weather.
I-Baked
The I-Baked dessert shop is located down a narrow alley in a very "hot" night-market area by Taipei Normal University. Although we had read about it on Hungry Girl's blog, we had not been intentionally seeking it. As it stood in front of us, however, we made our way in (twice, actually--once for a pre-Mary Jane cookie and once for a post-pizza ice cream sandwich).
Five minutes after my friends and I entered I-Baked (for the second time), another group of foreigners entered the shop, sat down with their ice cream sandwiches, and all let out the same moan of delight that we had each expressed five minutes prior. It was as if this ice cream and cookie combo elicited this exact response.
The vanilla ice cream is so sweet, smooth, and pure that you have to let out a verbal "mmm" because facial expressions just won't cut it. Your ice cream will not stand alone, either, as you can smush it in between two cookies of your choosing. I chose an oatmeal chocolate chip and a peanut butter cookie to accompany my vanilla ice cream, but the possibilities seem limitless because there several flavors of ice cream and even more types of cookies.
The cookies are as the I-Baked sign suggests: soft and malleable rather than hard and crumbly. Whether you want to enjoy them with a bit of ice cream in the middle, with coffee or tea on the side, or straight up as you walk down the street, these cookies will satisfy the little child in you that craves home made chocolate chip cookies. Good as they were, however, my mother has raised me with sometimes unreachably high standards for dessert. The oatmeal chocolate chip cookie was not as thick or as wholesome as it should have been the peanut butter cookie lacked a certain crisp outer crust and roasted peanut flavor. All in all, these cookies were great, but they were no home-made replacement.
