Afternoon Tea is perched on Sogo Zhongxiao’s second floor and overlooks Zhongxiao East Road — and the department store’s outdoor “It’s a Small World” clock, which is based on the popular Disneyland attraction and goes off with music and dancing dolls every hour. Fortunately, Afternoon Tea’s bay windows are soundproof and diners can enjoy their drinks and very sweet cakes and pastries in peace. The popular restaurant (we had to wait almost half an hour for seats on a Saturday afternoon) is as frilly as its fruit tarts, with rattan chairs, crystal chandeliers, flowers on each table and a giant mural of a cherry blossom filled garden.
I ordered an original apple pie (AT原創蘋果派, NT$150) and pot of hot caramel tea (焦糖, NT$120). Afternoon Tea’s version of apple pie is actually more like a layer cake, with slices of caramelized apples nestled in between syrup-soaked sponge cake and mounds of fluffy whipped cream. The confection sounds like it would be overwhelming sweet, but it is just right, with the whipped cream tempering the sweetness of the apples and cake. It paired very well with my pot of caramel tea, which is actually black tea with a hint of rich caramel aroma and not candy-like at all, even with sugar cubes and cream stirred in.
On a separate visit, my dining companion and I split a plate of spaghetti with tomato cream sauce, chicken and spinach (雞肉菠菜蕃茄奶油意大利麵, NT$210) from Afternoon Tea’s selection of pasta dishes. The savory chicken sausage was delicious, even though the price was a little high considering the rather dainty portion.
We selected our drinks, pineapple with honey jelly (黃金鳳梨薄菏伯爵冰, NT$150) and strawberry and raspberry julep tea (草莓覆盆莓伯爵茶凍, NT$160), because they were the most interesting looking selections on the refreshment menu. Both were so filled with jelly, fruit and cream, however, that they would have worked better as desserts instead of complements for our food. The tartness of each frozen pineapple chunk was lost in the honey-flavored jelly and juice; the strawberry and raspberry julep tea, which featured fresh fruit and berry syrup, was more refreshing, even though it had little in the way of actual tea.
If you are happy with your Afternoon Tea experience, you can take some of the restaurant’s atmosphere home with you by shopping in its relentlessly frou frou gift shop, Afternoon Tea Living. It is crammed with bone china tea sets, very flowery table linen, delicate glassware, Liberty-print bags, little silver spoons and other kitchen accoutrements, including handmade glass chopstick rests, decorated Pyrex measuring cups and a clever little plastic banana holder for people who are willing to spend NT$300 to avoid squished fruit.
When Taiwan was battered by storms this summer, the only crumb of comfort I could take was knowing that some advice I’d drafted several weeks earlier had been correct. Regarding the Southern Cross-Island Highway (南橫公路), a spectacular high-elevation route connecting Taiwan’s southwest with the country’s southeast, I’d written: “The precarious existence of this road cannot be overstated; those hoping to drive or ride all the way across should have a backup plan.” As this article was going to press, the middle section of the highway, between Meishankou (梅山口) in Kaohsiung and Siangyang (向陽) in Taitung County, was still closed to outsiders
US President Donald Trump may have hoped for an impromptu talk with his old friend Kim Jong-un during a recent trip to Asia, but analysts say the increasingly emboldened North Korean despot had few good reasons to join the photo-op. Trump sent repeated overtures to Kim during his barnstorming tour of Asia, saying he was “100 percent” open to a meeting and even bucking decades of US policy by conceding that North Korea was “sort of a nuclear power.” But Pyongyang kept mum on the invitation, instead firing off missiles and sending its foreign minister to Russia and Belarus, with whom it
President William Lai (賴清德) has championed Taiwan as an “AI Island” — an artificial intelligence (AI) hub powering the global tech economy. But without major shifts in talent, funding and strategic direction, this vision risks becoming a static fortress: indispensable, yet immobile and vulnerable. It’s time to reframe Taiwan’s ambition. Time to move from a resource-rich AI island to an AI Armada. Why change metaphors? Because choosing the right metaphor shapes both understanding and strategy. The “AI Island” frames our national ambition as a static fortress that, while valuable, is still vulnerable and reactive. Shifting our metaphor to an “AI Armada”
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has a dystopian, radical and dangerous conception of itself. Few are aware of this very fundamental difference between how they view power and how the rest of the world does. Even those of us who have lived in China sometimes fall back into the trap of viewing it through the lens of the power relationships common throughout the rest of the world, instead of understanding the CCP as it conceives of itself. Broadly speaking, the concepts of the people, race, culture, civilization, nation, government and religion are separate, though often overlapping and intertwined. A government
RSS