Yong Kang Street in Daan District (
Every weekend, long queues form outside the restaurant but few customers seem to mind. The fare is popular with Japanese visitors.
The restaurant's secret, according to owner Lu Wen-yung(
PHOTO COURTESY OF SITFUN SHIH TANG
Lu has been in the restaurant business for over 20 years. Every morning at 6am, he shops at a local market for the day's supplies. He likes to stock ingredients in his kitchen that are fresh and seasonal, which is why no menu is on offer, as the dishes often change. Moreover, Lu never uses imported vegetables or meat from China, so as to minimize the risk of using poor ingredients.
The restaurant, decorated with a Japanese colonial flavor, counts many big-name stars, singers, TV talk-show hosts, writers and politicians as its regular customers. Former premier Yu Shyi-kun has asked Lu to cater at the premier's nearby residence quite a few times.
A typical Taiwanese dish, steamed spare-ribs with taro(
Lu prefers his restaurant to stay quieter than other Taiwanese restaurants. So he rejects the idea of selling alcoholic beverages, except beer. Even so, he asks beer drinkers not to be too noisy. At a time when the streets of Taipei are flooded with Hong Kong-style dim-sum delicacies and Italian pasta restaurants, Lu feels very lucky that his restaurant can stand out among others and claim "a place in the sun" for Taiwanese cuisine.
Jan. 5 to Jan. 11 Of the more than 3,000km of sugar railway that once criss-crossed central and southern Taiwan, just 16.1km remain in operation today. By the time Dafydd Fell began photographing the network in earnest in 1994, it was already well past its heyday. The system had been significantly cut back, leaving behind abandoned stations, rusting rolling stock and crumbling facilities. This reduction continued during the five years of his documentation, adding urgency to his task. As passenger services had already ceased by then, Fell had to wait for the sugarcane harvest season each year, which typically ran from
It’s a good thing that 2025 is over. Yes, I fully expect we will look back on the year with nostalgia, once we have experienced this year and 2027. Traditionally at New Years much discourse is devoted to discussing what happened the previous year. Let’s have a look at what didn’t happen. Many bad things did not happen. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) did not attack Taiwan. We didn’t have a massive, destructive earthquake or drought. We didn’t have a major human pandemic. No widespread unemployment or other destructive social events. Nothing serious was done about Taiwan’s swelling birth rate catastrophe.
Words of the Year are not just interesting, they are telling. They are language and attitude barometers that measure what a country sees as important. The trending vocabulary around AI last year reveals a stark divergence in what each society notices and responds to the technological shift. For the Anglosphere it’s fatigue. For China it’s ambition. For Taiwan, it’s pragmatic vigilance. In Taiwan’s annual “representative character” vote, “recall” (罷) took the top spot with over 15,000 votes, followed closely by “scam” (詐). While “recall” speaks to the island’s partisan deadlock — a year defined by legislative recall campaigns and a public exhausted
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