West Well Cuisine (
The cozy and clean environment attracts customers at a first sight, and the delicious, uniquely prepared food keeps them coming back.
PHOTO: YU SEN-LUN, TAIPEI TIMES
The difference in the restaurant's stew knuckles -- and the secret keeping the stores walls free of grease -- is the "dry style" of preparing the knuckles. They are stewed in an off-location central kitchen and are sent to the store in vacuum packs without the soup. Without the big pot constantly stewing gelatin and fat out of the knuckles, the restaurant looks brighter and less greasy.
The process of stewing the knuckles sold here also gives them a unique spicy taste that further makes the place stand out from other knuckle stores.
Owner Lee Chang-lung (
If you like the jelly-like parts of the pig knuckle and are not afraid of the pig skin, I recommend Pig Knuckle Dry Noodles (
The key to the other house specialty, beef noodles (
The soup of the noodle is clear and light, not spicy at all, which is another major difference with usual beef noodles stores. Lee said the reason is to preserve the original taste of the meat. If you really want your noodles to be spicy you can add spicy oil into the soup.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s