As the "2006 Taiwan Lantern Festival" swings into full force in the Anping District (安平區) of Tainan City this weekend, a nearby fairytale-castle restaurant Wu Jiao Chuan Ban -- "Five-Dime Ship Driftwood" -- is worth a visit, if only to get away from the crowds. It is a two-story building that is almost completely hidden behind tall banyan and other trees.
The restaurant can accommodate up to 400 guests. It is located in front of the famous Eternal Golden Castle (億載金城), another hot tourist spot. The decor includes driftwood, high ceilings, roomy dining spaces, huge glass windows by the wall, large wooden dining tables and lots of green plants. The airy and relaxing setting gives diners the feeling of feasting in a forest.
Hsieh Li-siang (謝麗香), the artist-turned restaurant owner, who is in her early 40s, insists on serving Taiwanese and Chinese gourmet dishes to her patrons. She hires chefs from 5-star hotels to design and prepare new dishes and changes her restaurant menus every week.
PHOTO COURTESY OF WU JIAO CHUAN BAN
Hsieh's other two eateries do not appear to be like chain stores. Each one of them is built with distinctive features. They are located in Hsinying (新營), Tainan County and at Wenxin Road (文心路), Taichung City. A fourth restaurant in Neihu District (內湖區), Taipei, is scheduled to open by the end of next month.
The spacious eating tables and long business hours suits people who enjoy long afternoon tea times or late dinners. For this weekend, two signature dishes from the master chef are highly recommended. Five-dime green tea with shrimp (伍角綠茶蝦) is a sauteed dish made with high-quality Da-Mao-Feng green tea (大茅峰綠茶). The Thai-style fried taco steak (泰式花枝排) is crunchy and goes well with the homemade Thai sauce.
The restaurant serves numerous kinds of beverages, including coffee, tea, cocktails and different red wines. The house blend of Taiwan Coffee tastes superb. One popular sticky-rice-like dessert, called xian naini (鮮奶泥), or fresh mild mud, is made from fresh milk and dipped with peanut powder. The dessert usually comes with the meal.
One of the amazing things about Hsieh is that she insists on building her restaurants based on artistic instinct. She takes pride in claiming each restaurant is "a house built by a woman."
She taught herself to apply different media for various art creations and is not shy about showing off her works, such as nude female statues, inside her restaurants. Since this is going to be a busy lantern festival weekend, reservations are a wise idea.
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
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist