Korea House Village (韓屋村)
Address: 3, Ln 105, Shida Rd, Taipei
(台北市師大路105巷3號)
PHOTO: NOAH BUCHAN, TAIPEI TIMES
Telephone: (02) 2364-1980
Open: Daily from noon to midnight
Average meal: NT$1,000 for two, plus 10 percent service charge
Details: Chinese and Korean menu (English menu coming soon)
Proprietors of Korean restaurants in Taiwan often say the food they serve has been changed to suit local palettes, whatever that means. It sounds like some feeble excuse not to put the proper amount of effort into making the pastes and sauces, for which any Korean will tell you is as important as the meat or seafood it's served with, or slicing the meat used for barbecue so thin that it could only grace a hot pot.
Not so with the recently opened Korea House Village. Proprietor Zhao Yi-xian (趙懿憲) is unwilling to compromise authenticity to suite local tastes. Instead, he transplants 10 years of experience operating a restaurant in South Korea, where his mother-in-law grew the peppers and soy beans that go into making the pastes and sauces, to Shida. Three years in the planning, the tableware, the tables and chairs, even the cutlery is imported from South Korea. The walls are lined with tastefully finished traditional Korean art and glass display cases containing expensive ginseng alcohol.
Authentic Korean restaurants are worth a visit if only to sample the free appetizer dishes they serve before the meal. Korea House Village serves up six, and on the day we were there included asparagus, kimchi, pickled eggplant, mackerel and white radish marinated in light soy sauce, tofu in a light soy and ginger sauce topped with green onions and green vegetables marinated in sesame oil. Zhao says that aside from kimchi, the dishes change with the season.
Other specialties on the menu include tempura (NT$250) — a selection of white fish, squash, green onion mini pancakes and kimchi mini-pancakes — that is served with red-pepper paste infused with fresh garlic, hints of ginger and green onions. The exterior of each was crispy with the pancakes chewy on the inside and the fish light in flavor. The octopus and fresh cucumber salad marinated in hot sauce and surrounded by eight noodle nests (NT$300) was zingy.
A good deal for two is the bulgogi (NT$500), or marinated barbecue beef. Served with tofu, noodles, vegetables and seafood on a large iron plate, the mixture is then pan-barbecued and eaten straight up or with fresh lettuce leaves. The menu also offers an extensive selection of grilled barbecue dishes.
The problem with Marx’s famous remark that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, the second time as farce, is that the first time is usually farce as well. This week Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chair Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) made a pilgrimage to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) “to confer, converse and otherwise hob-nob” with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials. The visit was an instant international media hit, with major media reporting almost entirely shorn of context. “Taiwan’s main opposition leader landed in China Tuesday for a rare visit aimed at cross-strait ‘peace’”, crowed Agence-France Presse (AFP) from Shanghai. Rare!
What is the importance within the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) of the meeting between Xi Jinping (習近平), the leader Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), the leader of the KMT? Local media is an excellent guide to determine how important — or unimportant — a news event is to the public. Taiwan has a vast online media ecosystem, and if a news item is gaining traction among readers, editors shift resources in near real time to boost coverage to meet the demand and drive up traffic. Cheng’s China trip is among the top headlines, but by no means
Sunflower movement superstar Lin Fei-fan (林飛帆) once quipped that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) could nominate a watermelon to run for Tainan mayor and win. Conversely, the DPP could run a living saint for mayor in Taipei and still lose. In 2022, the DPP ran with the closest thing to a living saint they could find: former Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中). During the pandemic, his polling was astronomically high, with the approval of his performance reaching as high as 91 percent in one TVBS poll. He was such a phenomenon that people printed out pop-up cartoon
Apr. 13 to Apr. 19 From 17th-century royalty and Presbyterian missionaries to White Terror victims, cultural figures and industrialists, Nanshan Public Cemetery (南山公墓) sprawls across 95 hectares, guarding four centuries of Taiwan’s history. Current estimates show more than 60,000 graves, the earliest dating to 1642. Besides individual tombs, there are also hundreds of family plots, one of which is said to contain around 1,000 remains. As the cemetery occupies valuable land in the heart of Tainan, the government in 2018 began asking families to relocate the graves to make way for development. That
RSS