Tag: Fruits + juices

This well-known romantic garden café on one of Kulangsu’s main tourist drags is one more piece of proof that you’re in paradise. Leaves blow in the sunny breeze, flowers bloom, and birds serenade you with a symphony while you sit at wooden tables under umbrellas in the shade of an old brick mansion.

It’s an alluring respite for weary feet and jack of all trades for passers-by. You can spend many minutes wandering around the garden and exploring its nooks and crannies, gracious lawn furniture, shaded picnic tables, fountains, statutes, and friendly cats.

Inside is a series of refashioned dining rooms, which were once living rooms and bedrooms of the old mansion.

Once seated in the garden, you can sip coffee or tea or dig into satisfactory versions of basic pan-Eurasian standards like beef filet with black pepper gravy, Thai yellow curry beef or chicken, and spaghetti bolognese (65 ¥), which comes under-salted but otherwise correctly prepared—with a good dose of extra parmesan, it really hits the spot.

Beef-and-cheese pie is this kitchen’s version of an English pasty, with peppery, mincemeat-like ground beef and melted mozzarella baked into a greasy but still enjoyable pastry crust. It’s served with a petite raw lettuce and tomato salad–an oddity in these parts–dressed in a creamy, slightly sweet whipped-mayo-vinaigrette and tomatoes fresh with garden foliage aromas.

The sweet mayo from that vinaigrette rears its big head again and nearly ruins, but doesn’t quite ruin, a competently pressed panino with tuna fish, basil, and pine nuts that evokes Wolfgang Puck’s late foray into airport quick-service.

The beef filet is fresh, thick, satisfying, and expensive ( 178 ¥) with none of the off-flavors you sometimes get from frozen Australian steaks. The meat pairs well with the Chinese-style black pepper sauce, whose mushrooms invoke a German jaeger sauce, but the steak would be even more flavorful if it were salted and peppered before searing, as normal Western technique demands.

The menu is translated into excellent English, and lists a full range of other off-dry treatments for homesick westerners, like corn chowder with bacon, tiramisu, and “heavy cream blueberry cheesecake,” which is the precise consistency of Babybel cheese, i.e. slightly gummy and unnaturally melty, but not in a bad way. It’s set on a rich, delicate crust that’s just thin enough and drizzled with chocolate syrup and blueberry sauce.

Most people come just for sweet coffee drinks or juices, whose value proposition is far less clear, especially once alcohol comes into the mix. Espresso drinks are generally very small; a 40 ¥ iced coffee shaken with Bailey’s comes in a small white wine glass and is easily finished in two gulps. They’re good gulps, but these are full-on tourist prices.

House special iced coffee, described mysteriously in English as “Signature Beverage,” is mixed with passion fruit. If this sounds like a bizarre combination, that’s because it is: sourness and bitterness fight over your palate, and passion-fruit seeds floating in the cloudy brown glass are jarring. If you use your imagination a bit, though, the drink ends up taking on the flavor of an exotic dark chocolate. Or at least it seems that way when you’re in the midst of whiling away an afternoon, without a care in the world, on one of the island’s most pleasant gardens.

For more Kulangsu (Gulangyu) travel ideas, see the new Kulangsu Island Visitor’s Guide.