A Shanghai restaurant has closed down just a day after being awarded a coveted star in the Michelin Guide’s first Chinese edition.
Taian Table (泰安門) — one of 26 restaurants in the city to receive a Michelin star — “suspended” its business on Thursday “due to an internal reorganization,” a notice on its front door said.
The starred establishment, on the ground floor of a five-story residential building in downtown Shanghai, serves Western dishes ranging from grilled endives to smoked beets by chef Stefan Stiller, the restaurant’s Web site says.
It opened for business in April.
The diner was previously ordered to shut down by local officials due to it not having the proper licenses, the Chinese-language Xinmin Evening News reported yesterday, adding that authorities stepped in after the neighbors complained.
Residents who live above the restaurant said that kitchen smoke and noise interrupted their normal lives, and they petitioned local regulators to have the diner shut down, the report said.
“The noise is always there, with a subwoofer vibrating. It’s so hot where we live, but we can’t open our windows,” said Zhang Fuzhen, who lives on the second floor of the building.
The original idea for the restaurant was “to build a small place to entertain our friends, and to have some foodies and chef friends around to create new and creative dishes,” Taian Table said in a statement.
“We certainly never planned to break any rules,” it said.
The company plans to reopen after relocating to a new address, the statement said, while apologizing to all guests who had booked seats for the coming weeks.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day