The One Restaurant is a popular later-ish nite Taiwanese place that I’ve been meaning to try for ages — especially since I discovered that they had deep fried chicken skins. The food isn’t particularly well-executed, but the prices are reasonable, portions big, and the service (for our visit) was actually fairly quick and prompt.

Soundtrack time!

The singer from The Presets is such a hunk!

The One is (as Vancity Noms says), Lao Shan Dong‘s “younger, hipper, sister”.

Good to know…

I guess staff turnaround is high at this place. Most of our servers were young and on-the-ball. But one in particular seemed “green” and tentative. I’m sure she’ll improve if she sticks to it and gets more experience.

Everyone I’ve talked to says this is more of a late nite hangout type place. We were there around 6:30pm for dinner and it was about half full and service was fairly quick. Food came out fast…maybe too fast…

This place has big stuffed armchairs that have seen better days.

The scene at this place is mostly late teens, early 20s, slumped in these chairs, constantly on their smartphones while eating big portions of semi-unhealthy Taiwanese food.

Like a lot of Chinese restaurants, there are clumsy attempts at classy, sophisticated decor that come off as garish and inconsistent.

So what do you do when you want fried rice AND fried chicken? You order this Chicken Nugget Fried Rice ($10.99). Take some fried rice and throw in some chicken nuggets. Boom! Big enough to serve four.

This was actually one of the less oily fried rice dishes that I’ve had, but it wasn’t spectacular. There were clumps of rice in parts. In a good fried rice, all the grains should be separated. Tastes best eaten right away when the chicken is still crispy. Good but not great.

This dish (and most of our food) came out quickly…too quickly. It made me suspect that they have large quantities of already cooked food that they just assemble when the orders come in.

This pre-cooked quality was evident in this Deep Fried Large Intestine ($7.50). It came with some pungent garlic paste and sweet soy saucy kind of dip.

They went to the trouble of stuffing the intestines with green onion, but they didn’t seem to fry these to order because the outside just wasn’t crispy enough, and most of our food arrived sorta warm, not hot. Tastewise it was underseasoned. The ginger was a good pairing though.

Wicca asked for hot sauce, and they gave us two kinds! Too bad they were meh. The one on the right tastes like Guilin chili sauce that’s really salty and imho more suited for cooking rather than as a dipping sauce. The chili oil on the left was not that flavourful.

One of our more favourite dishes of the night, Deep Fried Chicken Skin ($5.50). Take chicken skin, batter it in the same seasoning as Taiwanese chicken ankles/knees/nuggets, and you get this. Fried basil on top. Not too salty, not too greasy. Tastes really great for the first few pieces, then the guilt and richness set in. Good thing it reheats well the day after.

We love that Taiwanese meat sauce on rice, but I thought we’d switch it up and try Taiwanese Style Stewed Pork ($10.75). Quite a generous serving of tender, fatty pork. Some pieces had skin! 🙂

Came with a big bowl of rice…

…and some sides. I appreciated the effort to include four sides but they sort just existed, the same way that The Gap exists and is utterly pedestrian and without distinction. 😛

The sides were (clockwise from left): green beans, vegetable medly, marinated root vegetable and fungus medly, and cold firm scrambled eggs with a chunk of tomato that looked like it fell down the stairs.

The highlight of this combo was definitely the pork. However, it was lacking in depth. It actually tasted MUCH better as leftovers. We actually got most of this food packed up to go because we ordered so much, but in the case of this stewed pork dish, a couple night’s stay in the fridge made this dish BETTER, and substantially increased its depth and flavour. Funny how that works with stuff like stews and curries…

Sliced Beef in Chinese Pancake (aka Beef Roll) ($7.50). Pancake was soft and mushy. Not crisp at all. Made up for by the somewhat generous filling. The best beef rolls are made with freshly-made pancake that’s soft, chewy, AND crispy all at the same time, with a good balance of filling and sauce. This version was far from that ideal.

Black Bean Matcha ($6.95), a soy-based drink that Wicca ordered hot. Really strong green tea flavour, and Wicca didn’t sleep a wink all night. The drink incorporates oats somehow, and we’re not sure how “black beans” figure into it. The stuff at the bottom of the glass is:

…chunks of taro…

…and what appears to be toasted rice. Wicca loved it but it was a caffeine bomb. She stayed up all night and could’ve done a 1000-piece puzzle — with all the pieces flipped over.

 

I think our server’s name was Cindy.

 

Bottom line: good but not great food.