If you think most Taipei urbanites are stuck in the rat race and would be too busy to stand in line for over 30 minutes to secure a pork chop for lunch, check out the tonkatsu eatery hidden behind the Cathay General Hospital on Renai Road. A beneficiary of the influence wielded by bloggers and online chat room gossipers, the restaurant's sets, consisting of a breaded, deep-fried pork cutlet served Japanese-style, are hot property.
Is the wait worthwhile?
Dinners can choose to fill up on the popular Japanese meal in two ways: traditional or innovative.
PHOTO: HO YI, TAIPEI TIMES
One option is pork chop served with daikon, or white radish, mash.
If simplicity is not your style, the restaurant does a range of pork cutlets stuffed with various fillings. For NT$310, patrons can make their own combinations of pork chop with two choices from over 10 options including cheese, kimchi, tuna salad, egg, crab meat and curry sauce.
Cheese tonkatsu seems to be the restaurant's tour de force. In one bite, the gooey cheese coats the chop's crispy layer and succelent meat creating a sumptuous trio of textures. The cheese and curry chop, on the other hand, tries too hard, and packs too much of a punch with a confusing array of flavors.
The kimchi option is sour, sweet, spicy and piquant, without one flavor dominating the dish. For those who want a feast for the eyes as well as one for the stomach, the laver and steamed eggs set and the plum sauce and crab option are must-tries.
Adding condiments to the meal is a treat in itself as diners are provided with pestles in which to grind white sesame seeds and other spices.
Fresh shredded cabbage, miso soup and high-quality rice come in unlimited supply with the sets.
As the establishment is pretty much full day and night, weekdays and weekends, the motto of the wait staff is to serve up the fare as quickly as possible with passable courtesy. Dishes are served at an admirable speed while wait staff politely ask permission to clean up empty plates from time to time. It is not an ideal venue for a lengthy tete-a-tete with an old lover. Don't hesitate to prevent the eager wait staff from taking away your half-finished food and be careful with the mustard dressing, it is fiery stuff and could have you wincing and blubbering through your entire meal.
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