ELV knows he’s supposed to start every day with a healthy and hearty breakfast, but ever since he was a mere sprout, he’s never been much up to the task. In his world, breakfast is good for only one thing: thinking about lunch. In this sense, he is quite European (or at least quite French, Italian or Spanish), as those eating cultures eschew, rather than chew, much food before the noon hour.

The real problem is: he’s not very hungry until he’s been up and at ‘em for a few hours, and this doesn’t bode well for ingesting the starch, fat, meat and carbo-rich bombs that comprise the typical American morning repast.

Enter stage right: Taiwan Deli’s very very Taiwanese morning offerings. No one’s ever going to mistake this food for a four-cheese omelet with home fries, bacon and a buttered biscuit, but it is packed with enough artfully-composed protein to send you on your way without feeling like there’s an anvil in your gut.

Some of the stuff, however, is just downright weird…at least to your average round eye. Of the two bowls above, one contained salted soy milk and the other something called boiled rice juice. The darker concoction (boiled rice juice) tasted like milky-thick peanut soup, while the salted soy milk tasted like warm water. No kidding. It was filled with curdled soy bean curd and look all white and inviting, but it had absolute no taste whatsoever! The Food Gal® remarked she detected a hint of oil and green onion in the broth, but ELV thinks she was just trying to be kind. This is not to say it wasn’t pleasant to sip, only that it had no flavor whatsoever!…and was possibly the most benign thing he has ever put it his mouth that wasn’t H2O.

Things got remarkably tastier with our crispy chicken roll, pork bun sandwich, and sweet and sticky rice roll (basically one of those long, deep-fried Chinese doughnuts inside a sticky rice wrap.) It was all quite satisfying, quite light, and quite healthy (we’re guessing) at least as compared to eggs Benedict, so ELV has resolved to work his way through the whole, reasonably-priced breakfast menu in the near future, to finally figure out how 1.3 billion people like to start their day.

The breakfast pour deux, pictured above, came to $16+$4 tip.

YI MEI CHAMPION TAIWAN DELI

3435 South Jones Blvd.

Las Vegas, NV 89146

702.222.3435