I'm sitting at a long, low Japanese-style table surrounded by immaculate white cats shorn like poodles. The owner of 33 Rooms -- an extremely loud and eccentrically friendly late-middle-aged Taiwanese woman who peppers her Mandarin with Japanese -- has just stuck her cheek in my face. I'm running through homophones for qin in my head in case I misunderstood what she just said.
"Um, she wants a kiss," someone translates.
Once the deed is done, laobanniang -- who gives her name alternately as Chen Min-ching, Olive ("like Popeye's girl-friend"), and Ringleader Chen (陳老大), and whom everyone simply calls laobanniang -- traipses off into the other room. A moment later a group of people yells in unison, "May you have youth and beauty!"
PHOTO: CHRIS PECHSTEDT, TAIPEI TIMES
"Xie xie!" yells laobanniang.
This, it seems, is a pretty standard evening at 33 Rooms. Then Chen storms around the otherwise relaxing polished-wood interior, cussing out the staff and fraternizing with the customers. If you go (and if you don't mind dropping a big wad of cash), go prepared.
"People come for me, not for the food," she jokes in between kissing my hand and trying to set me up with another patron.
The food is excellent. Like everything else about 33 Rooms, it is a part of the owner's cult of personality.
There is no menu. When your group enters, you'll say how much you're willing to cough up, and whether there's anything you don't eat, and Olive will take care of the rest (read: make whatever she feels like). Typically, it starts off at NT$1,000 a head and goes up in increments of NT$500, but smaller budgets are accommodated.
The restaurant serves all sorts of Japanese food, especially beef, sashimi and other seafood, like chunks of a 50kg snow crab. There may be hotpot as well.
The results of 22 years of constantly changing the menu are apparent in the dishes, which are smallish but exquisite. The smallness isn't bad, either.
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