Hello Kitty Sweets on Da-an Road is a kawaii mecca for the cult of the bobble-headed cartoon cat. A gigantic oval portrait of Hello Kitty mounted on the restaurant’s roof gives it a temple-like aura. The menu at Hello Kitty Sweets is not particularly memorable, as perhaps befits an establishment named after a cat with no mouth, but that might be beside the point. The main purpose of Hello Kitty Sweets seems to be providing a super girly, lace-festooned and very pink backdrop for photographs. It certainly succeeds on that front — on a recent Saturday, one group of happy young women even brought a giant Hello Kitty stuffed toy to pose with.
Not surprisingly, the dessert sets are the most photogenic and tasty part of Hello Kitty Sweets’ menu. Most of them are decorated with Hello Kitty-shaped chocolate pieces, Hello Kitty drawn on with icing, or green tea or chocolate-flavored powder sprinkled through a Hello Kitty stencil directly onto the plate.
Chocolate lovers will have a chocogasm over the Cointreau black chocolate tart (君度黑巧克力塔, NT$360), which is a pastry crust filled with chocolate truffles and topped with yet more chocolate truffles. If this tart were a Sanrio character, it would be Chococat, a little black kitty with big round eyes. More delicate in flavor is the “mad for strawberries” cake (草莓狂想, NT$340), layers of fluffy white cake interspersed with whipped cream and strawberries. Sweet, pretty and light, the “mad for strawberries” is the My Melody of the menu and is much less likely to put you in a sugar coma than the chocolate tart. In case you’re wondering, this character is a red-hooded white rabbit. One dessert that doesn’t deserve a Sanrio mascot is the boring almond tart with red wine poached pear (杏仁紅酒梨塔, NT$360). The almond tart had a pleasant buttery sweet flavor and texture that resembled shortbread, but the poached slices of pear on top were limp, clammy and flavorless.
Hello Kitty Sweets’ entrees are much less adorable. We ordered a steak topped with goose liver pate (嫩肩牛排佐鵝肝醬, NT$580). The meat was appealingly tender but curiously bland, leaving the very rich, somewhat salty pate to compensate for the lack of flavor. The pate and the bed of mushrooms sauteed in a spicy tomato sauce that the steak was served on both outshone the beef. My companion was also displeased with the candy-like raspberry sauce that covered one third of his plate, which, judging from its near identical appearance, seemed to have been made from the same mix as my glass of raspberry juice (綜合莓果茶, NT$180).
I had better luck with my smoked salmon Caesar salad (鮭魚凱薩沙拉, NT$350). The slices of fish were curled into little rosettes and sprinkled with chopped onions and tasty capers. The large bed of iceberg lettuce was tedious to work through, but the creamy, tangy, Parmesan-rich Caesar sauce made up for it (even though it wasn’t served in a Hello Kitty shaped cup).
Towering high above Taiwan’s capital city at 508 meters, Taipei 101 dominates the skyline. The earthquake-proof skyscraper of steel and glass has captured the imagination of professional rock climber Alex Honnold for more than a decade. Tomorrow morning, he will climb it in his signature free solo style — without ropes or protective equipment. And Netflix will broadcast it — live. The event’s announcement has drawn both excitement and trepidation, as well as some concerns over the ethical implications of attempting such a high-risk endeavor on live broadcast. Many have questioned Honnold’s desire to continues his free-solo climbs now that he’s a
Francis William White, an Englishman who late in the 1860s served as Commissioner of the Imperial Customs Service in Tainan, published the tale of a jaunt he took one winter in 1868: A visit to the interior of south Formosa (1870). White’s journey took him into the mountains, where he mused on the difficult terrain and the ease with which his little group could be ambushed in the crags and dense vegetation. At one point he stays at the house of a local near a stream on the border of indigenous territory: “Their matchlocks, which were kept in excellent order,
Jan. 19 to Jan. 25 In 1933, an all-star team of musicians and lyricists began shaping a new sound. The person who brought them together was Chen Chun-yu (陳君玉), head of Columbia Records’ arts department. Tasked with creating Taiwanese “pop music,” they released hit after hit that year, with Chen contributing lyrics to several of the songs himself. Many figures from that group, including composer Teng Yu-hsien (鄧雨賢), vocalist Chun-chun (純純, Sun-sun in Taiwanese) and lyricist Lee Lin-chiu (李臨秋) remain well-known today, particularly for the famous classic Longing for the Spring Breeze (望春風). Chen, however, is not a name
Lines between cop and criminal get murky in Joe Carnahan’s The Rip, a crime thriller set across one foggy Miami night, starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. Damon and Affleck, of course, are so closely associated with Boston — most recently they produced the 2024 heist movie The Instigators there — that a detour to South Florida puts them, a little awkwardly, in an entirely different movie landscape. This is Miami Vice territory or Elmore Leonard Land, not Southie or The Town. In The Rip, they play Miami narcotics officers who come upon a cartel stash house that Lt. Dane Dumars (Damon)
RSS