One of Taipei's long-serving Thai restaurant chains, Thai Town Cuisine -- which until earlier this year went by the name Very Thai -- has been cooking up some of the tastiest and spiciest Siamese meals in the city for over six years.
Unlike the bad luck that is likely to ensure following the changing of a ship's name, the name-change and interior face-lift that saw the chain's Nanjing East Road store reopening under its new moniker earlier this year, have neither dented its reputation nor seen the restaurant flounder in anyway.
PHOTO: GAVIN PHIPPS, TAIPEI TIMES
In fact, since reopening for business in April, Thai Town Cuisine, with its new slick black-and-red interior, has experienced quite the opposite after-effect. Patronage has continued to increase and looks set to continue to do so for the unforeseeable future.
The secret of its success, according to marketing supervisor Jean Lin (林宜靜), lays not only with the quality of the food served at Thai Town Cuisine, but is also heavily influenced by management's tenacity for consistency. Whether you choose to chow down at the chain's Tienmou branch or its Yongho branch, the food that will arrive at your table will be equally scrumptious, regardless of the social environment of the neighborhood you opt to dine in. "It's often difficult when you run a chain store to maintain a constant level of quality," explained Lin. "With one restaurant, it's easy to keep a good reputation, but, more often than not, when restaurants expand it all goes downhill." To ensure Thai Town Cuisine doesn't join the long list of establishments that have branched out, but failed to keep them coming back for more, management keeps an eye on its kitchens and what takes place within them. Much of what appears on the menu certainly won't come as a surprise to lovers of traditional Siamese fare. The uniform quality of the product, however, is worth noting. The menu is packed with all the standard Thai dishes such as curry crab (NT$450), sweet and sour cod Thai-style (NT$300), king pawn vermicelli (NT$450), spicy beef and cashew nuts (NT280) and coconut beef curry (NT$280) to name but a few. Along with the usual suspects, Thai Town does throw a few original dishes in the diner's direction. Finding dishes such as the red curry with vegetables and fruit (NT$180), deep-fried sea bass with tamarind and chili (NT$450), spicy octopus with cashew nuts (NT$300) and roasted pork with lemon sauce (NT$280) on the menu makes for a pleasant and certainly tasty change. The thing that really sets Thai Town Cuisine apart from its many peers, however, is the manner in which the chefs ensure each dish fires a chili-loaded salvo. Whatever you choose to dine on, it's guaranteed that it will contain a whole heap of chili and garlic. As well as Thai Town Cuisine's Yongho, Nanjing East Road and Tienmou branches, fans of Thai food who call Panchiao and Sanchung home can also experience the chain's appetizing Thai food.
US President Donald Trump may have hoped for an impromptu talk with his old friend Kim Jong-un during a recent trip to Asia, but analysts say the increasingly emboldened North Korean despot had few good reasons to join the photo-op. Trump sent repeated overtures to Kim during his barnstorming tour of Asia, saying he was “100 percent” open to a meeting and even bucking decades of US policy by conceding that North Korea was “sort of a nuclear power.” But Pyongyang kept mum on the invitation, instead firing off missiles and sending its foreign minister to Russia and Belarus, with whom it
When Taiwan was battered by storms this summer, the only crumb of comfort I could take was knowing that some advice I’d drafted several weeks earlier had been correct. Regarding the Southern Cross-Island Highway (南橫公路), a spectacular high-elevation route connecting Taiwan’s southwest with the country’s southeast, I’d written: “The precarious existence of this road cannot be overstated; those hoping to drive or ride all the way across should have a backup plan.” As this article was going to press, the middle section of the highway, between Meishankou (梅山口) in Kaohsiung and Siangyang (向陽) in Taitung County, was still closed to outsiders
Many people noticed the flood of pro-China propaganda across a number of venues in recent weeks that looks like a coordinated assault on US Taiwan policy. It does look like an effort intended to influence the US before the meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese dictator Xi Jinping (習近平) over the weekend. Jennifer Kavanagh’s piece in the New York Times in September appears to be the opening strike of the current campaign. She followed up last week in the Lowy Interpreter, blaming the US for causing the PRC to escalate in the Philippines and Taiwan, saying that as
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has a dystopian, radical and dangerous conception of itself. Few are aware of this very fundamental difference between how they view power and how the rest of the world does. Even those of us who have lived in China sometimes fall back into the trap of viewing it through the lens of the power relationships common throughout the rest of the world, instead of understanding the CCP as it conceives of itself. Broadly speaking, the concepts of the people, race, culture, civilization, nation, government and religion are separate, though often overlapping and intertwined. A government
RSS