Italian-Indian Restaurant

This restaurant (which seems to be called Bistro, judging from the sign) is one of the remarkably few Italian-Indian Taiwanese restaurants. You might be disappointed to find that there are no dishes on the menu that mix Italian and Indian, but both the Italian dishes and the Indian dishes are prepared well enough that you can forgive that omission.

The restaurant is in Hsinchu across from National Tsing-Hua University in the Three Great Circles area. A good number of the customers are foreigners. I suspect that the Indian food is not the most authentic, but it gets the approval of some Indian customers (as well as myself). There are often some young South American people eating here. I assume they work at the university. So this little restaurant clearly has international appeal. There is an English menu, and the proprietor, shown in the picture as a speck of orange shirt, speaks English.


Above is the chicken curry, which goes for NT$70.

This is the lamb curry, which is the only item on the menu for NT$80. I recently read some tips for photographing food. One of the tips was that it is not a good idea to photograph foods with brown sauce. While the above photograph may resemble vomit or worse, I assure you that it looks better in person. I've eaten there at least ten times and the only complaint I have is that the last time I went, the curry was a little spicy. The dishes are cooked to order, so they are always hot. The other curry choices are shrimp and fish.

This is the pesto spaghetti with ground chicken, which is NT$60. There are other spaghetti dishes on the Italian side of the menu, but the one shown above is by far the best, in my opinion. The picture doesn't do it justice. It would be great if there were some other items on the menu besides curry and spaghetti, but at under NT$100, these dishes are a steal. In fact, I constantly worry that this restaurant will go out of business, so give it a try.