If it's any testament to how well Isabelle Wen's fashionable new eatery above Renai Road is doing since its opening a few months ago, there wasn't a seat available at 8pm on Monday. Taipei's own design diva seems to have had no problem making the leap from haute couture to haute cuisine.
But haute cuisine doesn't exactly describe what comes from the kitchen into the chic dining room at Fifi. It's Shanghai and Szechuan cuisine, to be sure, but not like what you've come to expect at similar restaurants around the capital city.
You'll notice the difference from the appetizer page of the menu (NT$180 to NT$280), where stuffed green peppers, green beans with mustard, and bean curd stripped salad vie for your attention, on to Fifi's choices of "vegetables and eggs" (NT$220 to NT$280), as the menu lists them: Hunan double-cooked eggs, "mapao dofu" and other very interesting-sounding items.
PHOTO: DAVID MOMPHARD, TAIPEI TIMES
I chose the pumpkin with salty egg, having decided the "hairy gourd with silver fish" sounded too much like a still life painting. And I was glad that I did; the spice from the pumpkin and saltiness of the egg were nicely equalized by the dofu that found its way into each bite. I'd also ordered the stuffed green pepper, having heard from a source that it was one of the two best appetizers on the menu -- the other being the bean curd stripped salad with garlic, peanut sesame oil, cilantro and white-leaf lettuce. Alas, the stuffed peppers were sold out for the night and the bean curd salad was far more than a single person could put away.
Fifi's, it must be said, is best enjoyed with friends or family. Like so many other local restaurants, portions laid on the table are meant to be divvied up between eight to 10 people, making the ordering of as many items sumptuous but not sinful.
Not sinful until the meat comes to the table, at least. The source who told me about the bean curd salad also turned me onto Fifi's "don po pork" -- the one pictured above -- easily one of the better pork dishes I've had in a city stuffed with delicious pork dishes.
Finally, one of the better reasons to check out Fifi is the third-floor lounge that goes late on weeknights and even later on the weekends. DJ Edmund has just been confirmed as DJ for Wednesday nights.
Michael slides a sequin glove over the pop star’s tarnished legacy, shrouding Michael Jackson’s complications with a conventional biopic that, if you cover your ears, sounds great. Antoine Fuqua’s movie is sanctioned by Jackson’s estate and its producers include the estate’s executors. So it is, by its nature, a narrow, authorized perspective on Jackson. The film ends before the flood of allegations of sexual abuse of children, or Jackson’s own acknowledgment of sleeping alongside kids. Jackson and his estate have long maintained his innocence. In his only criminal trial, in 2005, Jackson was acquitted. Michael doesn’t even subtly nod to these facts.
Writing of the finds at the ancient iron-working site of Shihsanhang (十 三行) in New Taipei City’s Bali District (八里), archaeologist Tsang Cheng-hwa (臧振華) of the Academia Sinica’s Institute of History and Philology observes: “One bronze bowl gilded with gold, together with copper coins and fragments of Tang and Song ceramics, were also found. These provide evidence for early contact between Taiwan aborigines and Chinese.” The Shihsanhang Web site from the Ministry of Culture says of the finds: “They were evidence that the residents of the area had a close trading relation with Chinese civilians, as the coins can be
The March/April volume of Foreign Affairs, long a purveyor of pro-China pablum, offered up another irksome Beijing-speak on the issues and solutions for the problems vexing the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the US: “America and China at the Edge of Ruin: A Last Chance to Step Back From the Brink” rang the provocative title, by David M. Lampton and Wang Jisi (王緝思). If one ever wants to describe what went wrong with US-PRC relations, the career of Wang Jisi is a good place to start. Wang has extensive experience in the US and the West. He was a visiting
The January 2028 presidential election is already stirring to life. In seven or eight months, the primary season will kick into high gear following this November’s local elections. By this point next year, we will likely know the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate and whether the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) will be fielding a candidate. Also around this time, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) will either have already completed their primary, or it will be heading into the final stretch. By next summer, the presidential race will be in high gear. The big question is who will be the KMT’s
RSS