Are macarons the new cupcake? It seems that way. Stores selling the airy, delicate sweets are proliferating in New York City, where shops like Magnolia Bakery launched the cupcake craze. Macarons, which are meringue shells stuffed with ganache and other fillings (and not to be confused with the coconut-based macaroon), are also increasingly easy to find in Taipei.
The French confections are notoriously difficult to make and command higher prices than most other pastries, but Sadaharu Aoki (Tel: (02) 8729-2759) in the food court of Xinyi District’s newly-opened Bellavita shopping mall may be the last word in decadence. Tiny macarons (just two bites each) are NT$85 each. Eye-boggling prices aside, the French-Japanese patisserie’s macarons are wonderful, with perfectly crispy shells and a wide range of unusual flavors, including peche cannelle (peach with a hint of cinnamon) and yuzu (grapefruit).
The adorable Patisserie La Douceur (Tel: (02) 3322-2833, www.ladouceur.com.tw) near Yongkang Street (永康街) is a more affordable but worthy alternative to Sadaharu Aoki. Brightly colored macarons are sold by weight for NT$38 per gram and come in a wide range of unusual flavors, including balsamic vinaigrette (very accurate) and rose and litchi.
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