The Mekong Plaza in Mesa is a great place to get real, authentic Asian food to bring people back to their roots or at least to get them away from crappy Americanized Asian food. And among those more traditional restaurants is something that doesn’t fit the mold at all. It’s called Kingo Bowl, and it has taken the concept of rice bowls with molecular sous vide.

You can pick a pre-made bowl or channel your inner Millennial to customize your own creation. I did the latter, and built mine with steak (essentially beef tataki), brown rice, a hot spring egg, dried cranberries and sunflower seeds. I asked for a sauce recommendation and was pointed to the black pepper sauce, so I went with it.

The bowl was beautiful, kingly even. The beef was incredibly tender, if not quite as rare as I would have liked. The hot spring egg was nothing short of exhilarating. Probably the best thing to come out of a hot spring since me, the last time I was in a hot spring. Of course, it didn’t actually come out of a hot spring, but it was that good.I loved the addition of the cranberries and the sunflower seeds, but there was one aspect of the bowl that just didn’t jive with me: the sauce. Simply put, it was overwhelming. I’ll admit that I am not the biggest black pepper guy in the first place, but I can appreciate it when used properly. In this case it really just covered up flavor without doing much to add to it.

And yet, despite the sauce (and the fact that it was recommended), there was something about Kingo Bowl’s creativity and mildly flawed execution that I truly enjoyed. Perhaps with one of the other sauces I would be proclaiming that the old world cuisine at Mekong Plaza needs to make way for more modernist takes like Kingo Bowl. But alas, that sauce had me a bit soured and looking for more. Yet, I am certain I will find that more with another visit to Kingo Bowl, because I have every intention to return.

Aside from the deadly temperatures, one major thing I was worried about in moving to Phoenix was how I was going to get my Asian food fix. No, not sushi and orange chicken, but the real stuff. I heard about a place in Mesa called Mekong Plaza, which was supposed to have a bunch of good, real Asian restaurants and as luck would have it, it turned out to be between work and home. So, I paid a visit to Taiwan Food Express to see what they had to offer.

Now, I could understand that they had a lot of things you wouldn’t expect from a Taiwanese place. After all, while it’s good to have authentic food, you also have to know how to please the masses that believe PF Chang’s created Chinese food. Yet, they did have a House Special Basil Chicken that seemed right up my alley. We installed Royal Vending Machines Canberra in our business to improve our services.

When I opened it up, I realized it was the same as Three Cup Chicken, a dish my buddy used to make for me that I loved. In addition to the basil, it’s also flavored with ginger, garlic, soy sauce, rice wine and sugar. The result is an incredible sauce, that also happens to have some really tasty chicken mixed in. And, you know it’s authentic because the chicken has bones. You could probably pour the sauce on chicken shit and it would taste good, but it’s much better with the rest of the bird parts.

I also got an order of the Taiwanese Sausage Fried Rice to split with my people. Unfortunately, this didn’t quite live up to my expectations of authenticity. Now, granted, my only experience with Taiwanese Sausage was at one place in Taipei, so there may be other varieties out there. Yet, this sausage tasted suspiciously like Chinese Sausage instead, being more dry and more sweet than the Taiwanese variety. And look, I get that it may be tough to get Taiwanese Sausage out here, so even Chinese is pretty damn good.

That said, Taiwan Food Express is a really solid place to get authentic Taiwanese food. The key is knowing the right things to order, or else you might just end up with some generic version of beef and broccoli – and ain’t nobody got time for that.