The first thing that needs to be said about Du Hsiaw Uyea Taiwan Seafood Cuisine (渡小月蘭陽時尚料理) located in Yilan City is that it is not the same restaurant as Jerry’s Chinese Kitchen (祥瑞渡小月), located in Luodong Township (羅東鎮), Yilan County, which shares the same Chinese name. Nor is it Tu Hsiao Yueh Noodle Shop (渡小月擔仔麵), which originated in Tainan and has branches around Taipei.
All three have established reputations for excellent food, but the first two specialize in what can be termed creative Yilan cuisine.
Du Hsiaw Uyea, in English at least is notable for the bizarre spelling of its name, even by Taiwan’s notoriously flexible orthographic standards. It is also remarkable for the undefined nature of its menu. It is famous for a number of Yilan specialties, but when I arrived on a busy Saturday lunchtime and asked to look at the menu, I was told brusquely that there wasn’t one.
Despite the ostentatiously expensive artwork prominently displayed at the entrance and ye olde noodle stand real wood frontage, both indications that Du Hsiaw Uyea does not have any false modesty about its traditions and excellence, it was delightful to see the fresh seafood displayed at the back of the restaurant in exactly the same kind of refrigerated display case that graces virtually every night market seafood establishment from Taipei to Kaohsiung. I had no idea where to begin.
As a sop to the uninitiated, I was handed a leaflet with what turned out to be some of the restaurant’s pieces de resistance on it, but no prices. A helpful waitress cut to the chase. “You’re a table of 10. We can give you a menu starting at NT$3,500, NT$4,000, and up.” I named a price, and that was the last I had to do with the selection of food. (A set for two starts at NT$600.) This turned out to be an excellent decision, for the wait staff members, while run off their feet on the busy, noisy restaurant floor, knew what they were about. There was only one dud in a meal of 10 courses.
This was Mambo fish, otherwise known as ocean sunfish, a deep-sea creature with a very gelatinous consistency that has become something of a gimmick in high-end seafood restaurants.
This false note apart, everything else, from an unusual take on steamed shrimp, which seemed
to have at least a whole head of garlic in it, along with copious quantities of rice wine, and was so heady that the crustaceans themselves were almost, but not quite, an afterthought, to the shockingly black chicken in xian cao (仙草), or grass jelly, were of outstanding quality.
This last, which looked a little like a chicken stuck in an oil slick, caused some hesitation at first, but the subtle herbal flavors converted even the most wary of our group. The restaurant’s take on pig trotter, which had been cooked in such a way as to remove almost any hint of greasiness, had me craving more of a dish that normally I find cloying after one or two mouthfuls.
A plate of thick cut sashimi, despite the totally inappropriate placement of plastic newly weds at the center, was of superior freshness, and the cold collation, with its stuffed squid, fish roe and marinated water chestnuts provided culinary surprises that had nothing to do with the glass “ice sculpture” of a jumping fish at the center of the plate.
The attempts at hotel-style ornamentation might not have worked, but the food itself showed a mixture of innovation and a
firm grasp of the many, often labor-intensive, processes of
Yilan cuisine.
Reservations are highly recommended.
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
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist