The recent closure of the WeCare chain of bakeries was a sad day for Taipei's bread-loving community. Living up to its name, WeCare offered a variety of healthy breads, many of which catered to vegetarians, and carefully listed the ingredients of each loaf on custom-made signs. Indeed, the franchise went a long way to disprove the claim that Taiwanese have a penchant for only sweet white bread.
Another testament to the change in local tastes is the recently opened Lugar Home Bread Bar. Not so much a bakery as it is a restaurant, Lugar offers a variety of quality homemade breads (ciabatta, focaccia, rye bread and croissants are NT$40 each) that are baked daily on the premises.
But that's not all. Complimenting the breads is a variety of sauces - actually spreads - that are either served on the side or inside two sizes of bread rolls for NT$25 and NT$45. In addition to the bread, it is clear that customers come to Lugar for the many spreads available.
PHOTO: NOAH BUCHAN, TAIPEI TIMES
On both days I ate at Lugar, the restaurant was packed with patrons armed with digital cameras, making pictures which presumably ended up on their blogs. The interior, with its white walls, olive couches and chic finishing is attractive, but it is the bread and sauces that will keep patrons coming back.
Lugar also features a dinner menu, again complimented by their sauces, that includes pastas (NT$200) and steaks (NT$500 for lunch and NT$800 for dinner). A variety of pastries and eclairs is also served.
The tomato tripe (NT$70) is a tangy spread with large chunks of offal mixed with tomatoes, a combination that is at once flavorful and complimentary to the rye bread with which it is served. For the less brave, the sausage with veal sauce (NT$60), a mayonnaise-based dip with a smoky flavor, is also excellent. The restaurant also features French snail, lamb and pesto sauces (all NT$70), and salsa and salmon sauces (both NT$40).
Lugar sauces are also the main condiment for most burgers. We tried the German sausage with veal sauce and duck breast burger with balsamic honey sauce (NT$180). Though the five-grain submarines the sandwiches were served on were fresh, the amount of veal sauce added to the German sausage seemed to be making up for the small size of the bratwurst and the lack of veggies. The balsamic honey sauce, on the other hand, was a delicious mixture and complimented the taste of the duck.
Last week, Viola Zhou published a marvelous deep dive into the culture clash between Taiwanese boss mentality and American labor practices at the Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) plant in Arizona in Rest of World. “The American engineers complained of rigid, counterproductive hierarchies at the company,” while the Taiwanese said American workers aren’t dedicated. The article is a delight, but what it is depicting is the clash between a work culture that offers employee autonomy and at least nods at work-life balance, and one that runs on hierarchical discipline enforced by chickenshit. And it runs on chickenshit because chickenshit is a cultural
My previous column Donovan’s Deep Dives: The powerful political force that vanished from the English press on April 23 began with three paragraphs of what would be to most English-language readers today incomprehensible gibberish, but are very typical descriptions of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) internal politics in the local Chinese-language press. After a quiet period in the early 2010s, the English press stopped writing about the DPP factions, the factions changed and eventually local English-language journalists could not reintroduce the subject without a long explanation on the context that would not fit easily in a typical news article. That previous
April 29 to May 5 One month before the Taipei-Keelung New Road (北基新路) was set to open, the news that US general Douglas MacArthur had died, reached Taiwan. The military leader saw Taiwan as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” that was of huge strategic value to the US. He’d been a proponent of keeping it out of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) hands. Coupled with the fact that the US had funded more than 50 percent of the road’s construction costs, the authorities at the last minute renamed it the MacArthur Thruway (麥帥公路) for his “great contributions to the free world and deep
Years ago, I was thrilled when I came across a map online showing a fun weekend excursion: a long motorcycle ride into the mountains of Pingtung County (屏東) going almost up to the border with Taitung County (台東), followed by a short hike up to a mountain lake with the mysterious name of “Small Ghost Lake” (小鬼湖). I shared it with a more experienced hiking friend who then proceeded to laugh. Apparently, this road had been taken out by landslides long before and was never going to be fixed. Reaching the lake this way — or any way that would