Saboten - Da’an District

This is a great chain of Japanese restaurants located throughout Taiwan. This restaurant offers a wide selection of traditional Japanese dishes. I liked this place not only for amazing food but also for aesthetic pleasure. Serving food looked like in Japanese movie. Small plates, an endless amount of tea – everything was perfect for me.

Tonkatsu specialist from Shinjuku Tokyo Japan. You may order by iPad or hard copy menu. The food is tasty with unlimited cabbage, small dishes of black bean and pickled reddish, miso soup and rice. The overall service is very good. The price is reasonable compared with other Japanese restaurants.

Japanese style katsu don (fried pork rice). Comes with all you can eat rice, soup, and cabbage salad. Really delicious with their signature sesame sauce which you can ground by hand at the table. The location is really beautiful but for a slightly more elevated price (ie. 300-600ntd), I would have expected a more responsive waiting staff. The after dinner apple vinegar as dessert is something to get used to.

First time, we went in about an hour before closing, and we were the last ones in, so service was a little bit on the slow side, the cabbage, side dishes and sauce was nothing special, but the tenderloin tonkatu was by far the best I have had in Taiwan. Second visit confirmed that this location is a cut above the typical Saboten. Cabbage was done with care thinly sliced with no big chunks, cutlet was done well, not a lot of extra panko and the meat was juicy and soft.

Oct 2022 I want to mention that I only understand English and I got taken here by my Chinese-speaking relatives. This is a Japanese-style place specializing in (delicious! pork katsu. The place is well lit, clean, and relatively quiet with booths and combo chair/booth tables. The staff are polite in a formal, unobtrusive way. To order, you can tell a waitstaff or use the tablet they give. Note the tablet can be switched to English (it's not perfect, but enough for me to understand what I'm ordering . They also offer a drink dessert combo to your entree for an additional NT$79 (an excellent deal . We both got a Tonkatsu set, which comes with a salad, miso soup, rice, 3 veggies (black beans, burdock, leafy green , and a small cup of plum vinegar. You can get free refills on the salad, veggies, and rice. They offer 2 types of rice: white and something else. They also give you sesame seeds in a mortar with a pestle. I'm not completely sure what it's for, but according to my relatives, you grind up the sesame seeds and then mix it with the katsu sauce to use for the meat. The katsu sauce is already on the table in a jar with a wooden lid and ladle. For dessert, we got Matcha ice cream with red bean and sweet Red Bean soup/paste with sticky rice balls. Both were very good and I seriously recommend getting the combo deal. Very good price and very filling. I would definitely come again!