Address: 106 Huaining St, Taipei(台北市懷寧街106號)
Telephone: (02) 2371-4933
Open: 11am to 2pm and 4:30pm to 8:30pm on weekdays; 11am to 2:30pm and 4:30pm to 9pm on weekends and holidays
PHOTOS: RON BROWNLOW, TAIPEITIMES
Average meal: NT$290 per person
Details: Chinese menu; credit cards not accepted
Blessing has a window where pedestrians can see staff make jin bing (斤餅), or flour wraps. Both are signatures of restaurants that serve dongbeicai (東北菜), the food of China's three northeastern provinces. Blessing specializes in comfort foods that can be wrapped in jin bing, such as stir-fried vegetables with a scrambled egg "hat" (合菜代帽), shredded pork with bean sauce (京醬肉絲) and shredded pork with dried tofu (干絲豬肉絲). At Blessing these dishes are made with just the right amount of oil: enough to carry the flavor of scallions and chilies but not greasy.
The grid of alleys and old buildings between 228 Park and Ximending is home to several well-known hole-in-the-wall restaurants. Most are difficult to locate, even for repeat visitors. Not Blessing. Take the MRT to the National Taiwan University Hospital Station and walk through 228 Park to Huaining Street. Cross the street and look for the person in the window who's stretching, coiling and rolling oil-drenched dough into jin bing.
Don't visit Blessing for the ambiance. The restaurant looks new on the inside, but it won't win any design awards. It's hard to go wrong with an exposed ventilation system, track lights and a hardwood wall, but squeeze these into a narrow storefront and the whole is less than the sum of its parts, especially when the walls are painted a dark shade of mauve and the chairs are brown pleather.
Blessing will also not score points for service. Staff are efficient but can make the customer feel rushed to order. On one of two recent visits the jin bing maker, a middle-aged man with a crew cut, took a call that quickly ended with him barking "You're crazy!" and slamming the phone into the receiver. At first this was not surprising: Dongbei natives are famously loud and direct. But a waiter later said that the restaurant's founder is from Keelung, not China.
A date place this is not. Nor is this a place to visit alone, because it's no fun only ordering one kind of filling for your jin bing. Blessing is a good place for families or groups. The jin bing are about as well-made as you can get: light and fluffy but capable of holding lots of filling without breaking. And the menu lists a big variety of things to put in the jin bing, as well as tasty sides like stewed beef soup (清燉牛肉湯), a light broth with melt-in-your-mouth chunks of beef, cilantro and scallions.
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