If you took away the bar and dancing girls from Carnegie's you would still have a good restaurant, as a good crowd asking for tables showed at lunchtime earlier in the week. Clearly, there is something that Carnegie's does better than anyone else and that would seem to be taking care of the details.
While even relatively good restaurants in Taipei come and go, Carnegie's is here for the long run because it succeeds on four levels: First, there is the bar, which needs little introduction; then there are the club nights on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday; the tea time set of cakes and coffees in the afternoon ("Starbucks with ashtrays," is how general manager Bob Marshall described it); and last, but certainly not least, the food.
The menu is extensive and caters to a range of tastes. Whether you want to nibble on bar favorites such as quesadillas (NT$240) or mixed spicy sausages, or tuck in to a large fillet of North Sea cod in a crispy beer batter with thick-cut French fries, mushy peas and salad (NT$450), Carnegie's provides.
PHOTO: JULES QUARTLY, TAIPEI TIMES
There are eight starters, 14 main courses and four desserts on the a la carte part of the menu. Added to this are six types of salads and five items in the innovative British "Traditional Pub Fayre" section, including liver and onions (NT$330) and shepherds pie (NT$360). There is also a comprehensive selection of pasta dishes and five rice-and-curry dishes to choose from, including a chicken biryani (NT$390), which is earning rave reviews from the English ex-pat community.
We chose the chicken and mushroom pie (NT$360), rolled chicken breast (NT$450) and grilled port medallions (NT$490), all of which were larger than generous portions. Each meal came with its own tailored vegetable selection, so the pork came with red cabbage and apple sauce, flavored with cloves and nutmeg. The breaded and rolled chicken and goat's cheese arrived with caramelized Belgian endives and boiled potatoes, which complemented the pesto sauce. The chicken pie arrived with a large puff pastry crust and a selection of vegetables with mashed potatoes.
Marshall said the menu was changed in October and food sales went up 35 percent since then. "There has been a lot of development. It has been really successful. Basically, we wanted to put food on the menu that we wanted to eat ourselves."
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
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
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