Taiwan has great noodles everywhere you look: fat noodles, thin noodles, rice noodles, beef noodles — even cold noodles. But for those with more Western tastes, a good pasta can set you back at least a couple hundred NT dollars more than a your average bowl of noodles. Even then, the offerings are largely touch and go. Not so at the aptly named I Know Pasta. It is an entirely Taiwanese-run and staffed establishment, but as they claim, they do know pasta.
They have only recently made an English menu, and this becomes obvious when you read it: the carbonara is referred to as spaghetti with bacon and egg milk flavor (cheese), and the pesto is called spaghetti with pine nut green sauce. Don’t let this dissuade you, however. The carbonara is made with back bacon and full cream, and the pesto rivals any I have had. The cheapest dish on the menu, at NT$70, is the standard Bolognese, which has a rich ground pork and tomato sauce.
The most expensive pasta is the smoked salmon with cream sauce at NT$160. The serving of salmon is so generous it’s hard to imagine that one could make this dish at home for that price. The cream sauce has a hint of tomato, giving it a slightly sweet tang that goes well with the fish.
Again, they know what they are doing: when you get the salmon pasta as takeout, they pack the fish separately from the steaming dish so that it doesn’t overcook the delicate salmon — a small detail that really enhances the flavor.
Around 7pm there is usually a line at the front counter where you order, but again, don’t be put off, as the staff whips up orders at an amazing pace. There are three areas for dining in, with the dishes served on large white plates with proper cutlery (a fork and tablespoon). Takeout dishes come in standard white boxes with a plastic spoon and chopsticks. They also have a corn soup, and a variety of teas and soft drinks for NT$15 to NT$35.
Though the dine-in areas are fairly cafeteria-style in terms of layout, with a high turnover, the staff is friendly and the place is clean and brightly lit. Part of the charm is ordering at the main counter, over which you can see eight to 12 staff in an assembly line whipping up your order. The cashier yells to the main chef, who grabs a large frying pan and throws in meats, vegetables, stock, and begins tossing everything together. If it’s a cream dish he will grab a carton of full cream and add it at the last minute. Pre-cooked pasta (standard in even high-end restaurants) is added last, and the dish moves on to the platers or the packers. The dishwasher takes the pan and the next order begins.
When they are really busy, four or more chefs will be working at once, and their flying hands and obvious expertise is a pleasure to watch. As a fan of cream sauce, I prefer to get takeout — the 10 minutes it takes me to get home allows the sauce to thicken and cool down a bit.
Pour it onto a plate, arrange the salmon slices on the top, and dig in. It is the best pasta you’ll find, not because of the budget prices, but in spite of them.
s
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
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby