Persian Heaven, which opened five years ago, stands out on Taipei’s dining scene as one of the few places to sample Persian cuisine. Founded by an Iranian businessman, the dining lounge on Nanjing East Road (南京東路) features regular belly dance performances. Subdued lighting, loud music and cabinets filled with knick-knacks like busts of ancient Persian kings add to the fun and slightly kitschy atmosphere.
For an extra NT$150, most entrees are available as set meals, which are a bargain if you want to get a sampling of Persian Heaven’s expansive menu. Each set comes with a full-sized salad, soup, appetizer, side dish, dessert and drink, in addition to the main course.
We paired ghorme sabzi, or stewed beef cooked with split peas and vegetables (NT$370), with an order of Iranian bread (NT$60). Made from white flour, the bread was thin and chewy, like a tortilla, and not particularly memorable. The beef in the ghorme sabzi was juicy and the dish would have gone better with Persian Heaven’s saffron polo (NT$80), or white rice flavored with fragrant saffron.
The upbeat-sounding triple happy kebab king (NT$530) features a skewer each of beef, lamb and chicken and is probably the most attractive dish on the menu, with the gleaming chunks of meat set off by a colorful assortment of vegetables. The meat was succulent but had little seasoning, so we made sure to douse each skewer in limejuice to set off the flavor. On a separate visit, I ordered the meat and seafood combo kebab (NT$550), which came with two meaty, perfectly grilled tiger prawns, along with lamb (beef is another option).
Most of Persian Heaven’s salads use potato as the main ingredient, including the delicious chilled salad Olivier (NT$100), in which the tuber is diced and mixed with celery and chicken. There are only two appetizers. The seafood plate (NT$100) is a patty of chilled mashed potatoes served with a steamed prawn and garnished with relish and dill. It was OK, but the heaven chicken roll (NT$100), a light crepe stuffed with chicken and garnished
with a savory cream sauce, is much better.
Persian Heaven’s soups are passable, but if you aren’t ordering a set meal, I suggest skipping them to save room for dessert. Made from semolina and butter and flavored with honey and saffron, the hal wa (NT$80) was surprisingly delicate instead of overpoweringly sweet. The texture was like a thick pudding, making the treat a great comfort food. It tasted especially good with a glass of tart lemonade, which came with the set meal. Another good bet is the thick, creamy rice pudding (NT$80). It was complemented by a glass of cinnamon-y iced Iranian tea (NT$120, also available hot).
Our servers were uniformly polite and helpful on both visits, but we waited half an hour for our main entree (the triple happy kebab king) on a busy Sunday night — enough time, in fact, to watch the cheerful belly dancer teach two diners how to roll their hips. Dinner on a weekday moved at a quicker pace — each course was served as soon as I had finished the previous one.
The arithmetic is straightforward and uncomfortable. By the end of 2025, Taiwan had committed itself to a 50-30-20 electricity mix — half natural gas, 30 per cent coal, 20 per cent renewables. The Ministry of Economic Affairs’s (MOEA) own monthly energy reports tell a different story. Natural gas reached 47.8 per cent of generation last year. Coal stood at 35.4 per cent, comfortably above its target ceiling. Renewables came in at 13.1 per cent, well short of the 20 per cent Taipei had pledged a decade earlier. Installed renewable capacity reached roughly half of the 12 gigawatts (GW) the government
There are shadowy cabals plotting to sell out Taiwan to be annexed by China, by invasion if necessary. Fortunately, they are buffoons. In 2019, former Bamboo Union gangster and founder of the China Unification Promotion Party (CUPP), Chang An-le (張安樂, colorfully known as “White Wolf”), led a protest at the Legislative Yuan against comments made by then-premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) that in the event of an attack by China, he would never surrender, but would protect the nation by fighting to the end, even if he only had a broom. Chang had party members bring a wooden casket that they
It seems every few days one bumps into one of those “real man” comments in which Taiwan is urged to “face reality” or similar, and “make a deal,” with the speaker implying that soon it will be too late. “Deal” advocates always present themselves as having a superior grip on reality, and the manly ability to make the “hard choice.” Their testosterone-laden language often echoes that of Taiwan sellout advocates. Note that such commentary always specifies a process (“make a deal, work with, make progress”), never the end state of what occupation by a violent authoritarian colonialist state will entail. In
Taiwan’s drone exports are taking off, fuelled by the war in Ukraine, as Taiwanese companies seek a stake in the fast-growing global market for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). Low-cost drones used for reconnaissance and strikes are in high demand as governments around the world boost defense spending in the face of intensifying conflicts. A relative new player in the increasingly competitive industry, Taiwan’s pitch is to be an “Asian hub” for the production of UAVs and components free of Chinese materials, or “non-red.” That means its UAVs can be up to three times more expensive than their Chinese competitors, like the world’s biggest
RSS