Ziga Zaga at the Grand Hyatt Taipei (台北凱悅大飯店)
2F, 2 Sungshou Rd (松濤路2號2樓); tel 2720-1200. Lunch buffet: NT$680, from 11:30 am to2:30pm. Dinner is a la carte, 6 to9pm. English menu. Credit cards accepted.
It is probably not enough to say that everything is completely authentic and of the highest quality at Ziga Zaga's Italian lunch buffet. Even more telling is that there is not one single cheap dish of the kind that most buffets use as filler. Putting it more explicitly, they have made the bold and correct decision to forego the omnipresent tray of buffet sashimi, and though they do offer smoked salmon, it is of a slightly higher grade and reasonably consistent with the Italian theme.
Further to their credit, the adaptation of the buffet concept to Italian cuisine has been handled admirably. The extensive selection of cold dishes - including fresh mozzarella and tomato, calimari, prosciuto, salads, and real eggplant, squash, and zucchini roasted and marinated in olive oil - basically serves as a DIY antipasto. Next comes a meat course, like polenta, pork medallions in mushroom sauce, or garlic and chorizo rice. Lastly, there is pasta, which is made to order from a selection of noodles and five types of sauce. Of course, this removes the meal from the realm of pure buffet, but no one*s complaining.
The final bonuses of the Ziga Zaga lunch are freshness and price. The restaurant*s relatively small scale allows it to serve dishes on platters of ten servings, which are constantly replaced during the meal. And as Taipei hotel fare goes, NT$680 is pretty reasonable.
Atrium Cafe, Far Eastern Plaza Hotel (台北遠東國際大飯店)
6F, 201 Tunhua S. Rd., Sec. 2 (敦化南路二段201號6樓); tel 2378-8888. Lunch, NT$820 on weekdays and NT$920 on weekends, 11:45am to 2:30pm. Dinner, NT$980, 6 to 9:30pm. English menu. Reservations recommended. Credit cards accepted.
The Atrium Cafe is a large-scale buffet that, like most Taipei hotel buffets, caters largely to local diners. Since they have many regular customers, resident manager Michael Hendler says that it is necessary to keep things fresh by mixing up the theme, even if that means a complete overhaul of the menu once a month. So for July, the cuisine was American, for September it will enterprisingly focus on the cuisine of Penghu, and for August it is Malaysian, which intentionally coincides with Malaysia's national day a little later this month.
As for the current buffet, with more than a hundred dishes to choose from, it is able to explore the width and breadth of Malaysian food and its various influences, including Indian, Indonesian, and those recipes that can only be called uniquely Malay. Thus you'll find gado gado (a vegetable, tofu, and egg salad under peanut sauce), satay skewers, beef rendang, and black pepper crab. If you need verification of the authenticity beyond your own taste buds, Hendler says that the Far Eastern is able to use its international synergy to outsource recipes from other resorts, occasionally even inviting a guest chef. Lastly, the service is impeccable.
East West at the Westin Taipei (六福皇宮的東西燴)
2F, 133 Nanking E. Rd., Sec. 3 (南京東路三段133號2樓); tel 8770-6565. Buffets: breakfast, NT$600, 6:30 to 10:00am; lunch, NT$850, 11:30am to 2pm; dinner, NT$950, 6 to 9pm. A la carte dining all day. English menu. Credit cards accepted.
As the restaurant's name may indicate, East West offers a buffet that mixes all the best of Asian and occidental cuisine. And even though such a concept could present some potentially odd mixtures for the palate, the restaurant has managed to pull it off. The successful mix of dishes is planned by an executive chef, who draws on the resources of the Weston*s eleven other restaurants, including Japanese, four varieties of Chinese, Italian, Irish, and a New York deli.
East West's weekly highlight, however, comes on Wednesday nights with a special seafood buffet. Though the price is NT$100 higher than normal, it is the restaurant*s highest draw, probably because it offers a whole ocean of seafood all at once. Not that there is no seafood in the standard lunch and dinner buffets. At every meal, there will be someone to shell all the fresh oysters you can eat. There are also delicious hot dishes of Tasmanian salmon (which is less fatty than Norwegian), one variety of which is prepared fresh on a grill in the restaurant's kitchen area.
The kitchen area - where one can find fresh grilled beef, the aforementioned salmon, roast beef, and two types of pasta - naturally means that East West is another buffet-restaurant hybrid. Again, this is completely to the advantage of the diner, who is ensured that everything is fresh. Lastly, don't forget the desserts. Several of them, like the strawberry mousse, stray away from heavy cream and cheese-based standards to provide something a little lighter, though equally delicious.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would