One of the better restaurants in town, Shintori (Cuisine Japonaise) has an ornamental bamboo grove outside and oozes class inside, with its attention to design and stripped-down neo-industrial look. The ambience of the place, fortunately, is matched by the service and food.
Comprising a main seating area -- which is set off from the sashimi bar by a large etched plate-glass window -- there is an open kitchen, tunnel-like corridors and faux bridges or water-themed decorative elements. The restaurant also has many private booths that cater to groups of friends, families or a romantic tete-a-tete, that are set up like small sitting rooms, with simple wooden tables, a decorative highlight or freshly cut flowers.
PHOTO: JULES QUARTLY, TAIPEI TIMES
Dinner began with tea and not just any old cha -- a light and fragrant oolong, or clean-tasting green tea -- before moving on to starters that were inventive and genuinely appetizing. "Cubic appetizers" was a nine-box assortment of sushi and sashimi in little black-and-white colored boxes. Rock 'n' roll salad sounded intriguing but I plumped for the rice and salmon flakes in tea soup, which was tasty and powerfully fishy with the addition of small, orange globes of roe.
Main course choices included a sashimi salad with an amazing confection of varied green leaves and hearts of lettuces, along with radishes, baby corns and raw fish, sprinkled with in an elegant dressing. I chose the grilled XXL chicken on a skewer, which arrived with dried chili and cracked pepper, over the promising beef hot pot, grilled black bass filet with buckwheat, and assorted tempura platter. The chicken was good, with extra points for the subtle lemon grass flavoring.
The owners have clearly gone for "zen-style cooking," which they claim has evolved from food served in temples and "the simple diet of Buddhist priests ... into a creative and interesting cuisine." It works, I think, because of good management. There are four Shintori company restaurants in Taipei (which include the People bar and fusion restaurant further down Anhe Road that has become popular with media and business types), with three more in Shanghai. Attention to detail makes the restaurant chain stand out.
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