Liu’s Taiwanese Restaurant is a small family run restaurant located in Union Square Shopping Centre.  This place is located right next to Richmond Sushi.  You can expect to find a variety of rice and noodle combos here.  We were here on a weekday for an early lunch and the restaurant was quite busy.  We started off the meal with the marinated egg.  This is only 75 cents and is Rockia’s favourite start to a Taiwanese meal.

We were very hungry so we ordered the satay beef noodle, a fried chicken drumstick with rice, and an oyster cake.  They were all very delicious, but a bit oily.  The first to arrive was the satay beef noodle.  This was the oiliest because of the satay sauce.  If you’ve ever bought a whole can of satay sauce from the super markets, you will see that it is actually mostly a can of oil with satay soaked in it.  We expected the oiliness and didn’t mind it very much.  There were a couple pieces of vegetables in the dish and upon the first bite I noticed that they were very crunchy!  This dish was pretty good overall because the thick savoury satay sauce was really the heart and soul of this dish.

Our next main dish is the fried chicken drumstick.  This was thickly coated in batter which made it very crispy. I didn’t mind the thick batter because the crunchiness worked well with the sauce and the chicken didn’t taste too oily because of this.

The dish came with a lots of mixed vegetables and rice.  The rice had Taiwanese meat sauce on it which made it even better.  I was amazed by the size of this dish because it was actually not that pricey!

I was curious about the oyster cake and ordered that as well.  This was different from what we usually have because the oyster cake isn’t made with only egg and oyster.  Instead, they used a clear floury dough as the base of the oyster cake.  As well, there were pieces of cooked vegetables on the bottom.

The oyster cake was topped with the same sauce that was on the fried chicken.  We didn’t really enjoy this because it was actually slimy!  The dough, sauce and oyster was all overly moist.  The dough was not cake-like but more like a chewy dough.  We weren’t used to the texture of this dish so it wasn’t a big hit with us.

The bill for the lunch came out to be $20.75.  We thought this was reasonable because we ordered a lot of food for only two people.  Liu’s does offer some main dishes like tofu and eggplant, but this place is known best for their rice and noodle combos.

Overall impression:

Good:

• cheaper prices
• big plates

Bad:

• dishes can be a bit too oily