A good restaurant feeds the body, but a great restaurant feeds the soul, transporting it to another place or time. The Astoria in Taipei's Wuchang Street is like a portal that takes diners back in time to 1949, to the kind of respectable cafe our Western grandmothers dressed up to lunch at. It provides a feast for the senses with its classic recipes, as well as a few new surprises.
The Astoria was reopened in July by the same family that has kept the bakery downstairs going for 55 years, to the delight of the culturati who had made the place their second home (and like family, patriarch Archiybold Chien fed some of the writers and artists in their lean years). One booth has photos of its longtime literary denizens.
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ASTORIA
But the food stands up to the challenge of recreating a past. Four salads are offered in the mid-NT$200 price range, including a chef's salad, Russian, Caesar and fruit. The Caesar was satisfying, served with four helmeted but naked prawns. The tiny croutons, bacon and romaine were all perfectly crisp, with a dressing more sweet than redolent of garlic and anchovy.
The smoked salmon spaghetti turned out to be a handsomely made plate of fettucine topped with a wide slice of smoked salmon. Underneath were chunks of fresh salmon in a cream sauce, with a rainbow of delicately julienned peppers and onions.
The "course" menu offers fried meats and seafoods for NT$280 to NT$350. Specials (found not on the menu but on a tabletop card in Chinese only) top the price range with steak and lamb, both NT$580. They also include beef cooked in red wine for NT$380 and something that was described to me as "pancakes with cheese and vegetables" for NT$300.
This turned out to be a surprise -- a large plateful of quesadillas, served with a creamy sauce (that wasn't sour cream) and sweet salsa heady with oregano but lacking the usual smoky cumin. A slight afterburn comes from the canned jalapenos in the lighter-than-tortilla crepes, filled with chicken, cheese and julienned vegetables. You're not in the 1950s anymore. Rounding out the offerings are numerous varieties of coffee, the bakery's pastries and fruit frappes.
This is the place to take your visiting family when they've tired of noisy Chinese restaurants and want to catch their breath.
What was the population of Taiwan when the first Negritos arrived? In 500BC? The 1st century? The 18th? These questions are important, because they can contextualize the number of babies born last month, 6,523, to all the people on Taiwan, indigenous and colonial alike. That figure represents a year on year drop of 3,884 babies, prefiguring total births under 90,000 for the year. It also represents the 26th straight month of deaths exceeding births. Why isn’t this a bigger crisis? Because we don’t experience it. Instead, what we experience is a growing and more diverse population. POPULATION What is Taiwan’s actual population?
After Jurassic Park premiered in 1993, people began to ask if scientists could really bring long-lost species back from extinction, just like in the hit movie. The idea has triggered “de-extinction” debates in several countries, including Taiwan, where the focus has been on the Formosan clouded leopard (designated after 1917 as Neofelis nebulosa brachyura). National Taiwan Museum’s (NTM) Web site describes the Formosan clouded leopard as “a subspecies endemic to Taiwan…it reaches a body length of 0.6m to 1.2m and tail length of 0.7m to 0.9m and weighs between 15kg and 30kg. It is entirely covered with beautiful cloud-like spots
For the past five years, Sammy Jou (周祥敏) has climbed Kinmen’s highest peak, Taiwu Mountain (太武山) at 6am before heading to work. In the winter, it’s dark when he sets out but even at this hour, other climbers are already coming down the mountain. All of this is a big change from Jou’s childhood during the Martial Law period, when the military requisitioned the mountain for strategic purposes and most of it was off-limits. Back then, only two mountain trails were open, and they were open only during special occasions, such as for prayers to one’s ancestors during Lunar New Year.
A key feature of Taiwan’s environmental impact assessments (EIA) is that they seldom stop projects, especially once the project has passed its second stage EIA review (the original Suhua Highway proposal, killed after passing the second stage review, seems to be the lone exception). Mingjian Township (名間鄉) in Nantou County has been the site of rising public anger over the proposed construction of a waste incinerator in an important agricultural area. The township is a key producer of tea (over 40 percent of the island’s production), ginger and turmeric. The incinerator project is currently in its second stage EIA. The incinerator
RSS