Indian Fans is a decent little lunch shack, but in the end comes off as a restaurant that resulted from someone bringing their vacation home with them.
We all know someone who's gone on vacation and learned to cook Thai food in a Thai cooking school. And here on Yungkang Street, with its bright, tropical color scheme and decorative fabrics and carvings, is the Indian curry equivalent.
The restaurant's offerings are simple, curry set meals and a range of beverages. The owners claim that they grind and then boil the curry themselves, eschewing ready-made pastes and powders. But I say the proof is in the pudding.
PHOTO: DAVID FRAZIER, TAIPEI TIMES
I tried two types of curry, lamb (NT$200 set) -- in which the curry and the meat were fried in with the rice -- and vegetarian (NT$200 set) -- which came as a more standard curry presentation, with the curried vegetables coming in a companion dish to the plate of saffron rice and side vegetables. The lamb was good, but came off more as a tasty lamb fried rice as there was no spiciness and the curry flavor was faint. The vegetarian curry contained delicious vegetables, but the curry was a little too sweet with coconut milk.
The more I thought about it, the more the food seemed to be what could technically be called "fusion" -- cooking that results from the intersection of two cultures, but in the end belongs to neither of them. All of the vegetables in the veggie curry dish can also be tossed into a hot pot, but currying them and pouring them over a fairly authentic mound of saffron rice gives them a completely new identity. The stir-fried curry lamb (and beef) approach suggests a similar analogy, as does the curried fish cheeks set (NT$350).
But before I wander too far off into cultural anthropology, let me mention the beverages, which are probably Indian Fans' greatest strength. It sells strong Indian coffee for NT$60 and Masala milk tea for NT$70. When it gets warmer, it will sell lassi, the favorite Indian yogurt drink, both inside and from a to-go window facing Yungkang Park for a very reasonable NT$60. It should offer good competition to the glut of tea, coffee and bubble tea shops with which it shares a couple of neighborhood blocks.
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
Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located