Eat 3 Bowls — Taiwanese trio + bubble milk tea ($18)!
Eat 3 Bowls (口呷三碗) Lavender: the namesake trio of braised pork rice, shredded chicken rice and noodle soup, plus bubble milk tea with brown sugar pearls. $18.
Lunch at Eat 3 Bowls (口呷三碗) at Lavender. The Taiwanese trio + bubble milk tea, $18. 😋👍🏼
What was on the wooden tray:
- Bowl 1, lu rou fan (滷肉飯): hand-diced braised pork belly piled over rice, glossy from the reduced master sauce, scallion heap on top
- Bowl 2, shredded chicken rice (鸡丝饭): poached chicken hand-shredded over rice, dressed with the fried-shallot oil and a coriander tuft
- Bowl 3, noodle soup: thin noodles in the dark braising-style broth with tender pork pieces and coriander
- Bubble milk tea: the classic milk tea with brown-sugar-soaked pearls streaking the cup, served in the branded cup
The trio is the literal namesake order: the shop is called “Eat 3 Bowls” (口呷三碗 in Taiwanese Hokkien), and this set is the answer. Three small bowls instead of one big one, covering the three pillars of Taiwanese street rice-and-noodle food in a single tray.
Lu rou fan remains the headline act: pork belly hand-cut into small dice (never machine-minced), braised hours in the soy-rock sugar-five spice master stock until it collapses into the rice. The hand-dicing matters: you get alternating fat-lean cubes rather than uniform mince paste.
The shredded chicken rice (鸡丝饭) is the underrated sibling: poached chicken torn along the grain, laid over rice with fried shallot oil as the only sauce. Where the lu rou is dark and rich, this bowl is clean and aromatic, the Taiwanese answer to Hainanese chicken rice with the shallot oil doing the work the chicken fat does in the local version.
The noodle soup rounds out the trio with the brothy option, the same braising-liquid depth in soup form.
The bubble milk tea completes the Taiwan-in-one-meal experience: proper chewy pearls, tea-forward rather than condensed-milk-sweet. Taiwanese food without boba is an incomplete sentence.
At $18 for three bowls and a boba, this undercuts flying to Taipei considerably. Per-bowl pricing runs $4-$6 if ordered separately.
Overall: 4.5 / 5. 😋👍🏼 The trio format is the right way to eat here. Lu rou fan still the king bowl, the shallot-oil chicken the surprise second. Would re-queue, again.
