Take your shoes off, eat light and leave feeling utterly satisfied after a visit to Weitzuman (味自慢), an izakaya near Jingmei MRT Station (景美捷運站). The izakaya, Japan’s version of a tapas bar, is meant to be an after-work destination where friends and colleagues share small, savory dishes and wash the food down with sake and beer. With its welcoming atmosphere and a menu of grilled, deep-fried and cold dishes, Weitzuman fits the description well.
The food is great. There was not one dud among the handful of dishes ordered on a recent visit. Fresh sashimi (NT$350 for a small plate, NT$480 for a large serving) is available as at most sit-down Japanese eateries, but there are many more interesting choices.
My dining companion and I did well by following the friendly waitstaff’s suggestions, which included several house recommendations listed on the menu. The “field mushrooms with mountain fern vegetable” (野菇山蕨, NT$160) was a delectable stir-fried dish, with thin and tenderly cooked slices of shitake and golden-needle mushrooms serving as a nice complement to the shanjuecai (山蕨菜), a vegetable with a crunchy stalk and a mild flavor.
Photo: David Chen, Taipei Times
The homemade sesame tofu (手工胡麻豆腐, NT$100) was a revelation: The dish arrived looking like a plain, ho-hum block of soft tofu, but were we in for a surprise. This concoction, made with crushed sesame seeds, had us laughing out loud with pleasure from the very first bite. The savory, nutty flavor of the sesame seeds was a perfect match for the creamy, mousse-like consistency of the tofu. Don’t leave the restaurant without trying it.
Weitzuman is refreshingly unpretentious and has the kind of down-home charm one might imagine of a traditional Japanese inn. Enter through sliding wooden doors, take a seat at the front and watch the chefs at work.
Large parties can sit cross-legged on benches in the front room or on cushions on an elevated wooden floor in the back. Either way, you’ll be taking off your shoes before taking your seat.
Photo: David Chen, Taipei Times
Adding to the relaxed, lived-in feel, the restaurant plays nakashi (那卡西) oldies, sung both in Japanese and Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese), at a civilized volume. Weitzuman has been at this location for eight years (it has been in the Jingmei area for 15 years), and you can tell that not much has changed: The wallpaper is faded and peeling a little, but the place is generally tidy, albeit a bit cluttered. Near the front door sit stacked boxes of beer: Tall bottles of Asahi are NT$130, Taiwan Beer is NT$100 and regular sized bottles of Heineken are NT$80. Sake is available and ranges from NT$180 to NT$680 per 300ml serving.
In general, the food portions for each dish are just enough for two persons. We ordered seven dishes, including miso soup (NT$50), and our lunch totaled around NT$850.
It was very much worth the price — our meal only got better. The “top grade beef steak” (特優牛小排, NT$280), thinly sliced and grilled so it was charred on the outside and red on the inside, was melt-in-your-mouth delicious. It came with a lemon wedge and yellow mustard (the kind you put on 7-Eleven hot dogs), which I initially scoffed at, but quickly changed my mind after a taste: They went together perfectly. The salmon onigiri (鮭魚飯糰, NT$80 for two), or rice balls with salmon flakes, is also worth a try, and the grilled shitake mushrooms (香菇串烤, NT$70), rounded out our meal nicely.
Reservations are recommended at Weitzuman, although we didn’t need one on Sunday afternoon, the only time of the week the restaurant is open for lunch.
Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) and the New Taipei City Government in May last year agreed to allow the activation of a spent fuel storage facility for the Jinshan Nuclear Power Plant in Shihmen District (石門). The deal ended eleven years of legal wrangling. According to the Taipower announcement, the city government engaged in repeated delays, failing to approve water and soil conservation plans. Taipower said at the time that plans for another dry storage facility for the Guosheng Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Wanli District (萬里) remained stuck in legal limbo. Later that year an agreement was reached
What does the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) in the Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) era stand for? What sets it apart from their allies, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)? With some shifts in tone and emphasis, the KMT’s stances have not changed significantly since the late 2000s and the era of former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九). The Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) current platform formed in the mid-2010s under the guidance of Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), and current President William Lai (賴清德) campaigned on continuity. Though their ideological stances may be a bit stale, they have the advantage of being broadly understood by the voters.
In a high-rise office building in Taipei’s government district, the primary agency for maintaining links to Thailand’s 108 Yunnan villages — which are home to a population of around 200,000 descendants of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) armies stranded in Thailand following the Chinese Civil War — is the Overseas Community Affairs Council (OCAC). Established in China in 1926, the OCAC was born of a mandate to support Chinese education, culture and economic development in far flung Chinese diaspora communities, which, especially in southeast Asia, had underwritten the military insurgencies against the Qing Dynasty that led to the founding of
Artifacts found at archeological sites in France and Spain along the Bay of Biscay shoreline show that humans have been crafting tools from whale bones since more than 20,000 years ago, illustrating anew the resourcefulness of prehistoric people. The tools, primarily hunting implements such as projectile points, were fashioned from the bones of at least five species of large whales, the researchers said. Bones from sperm whales were the most abundant, followed by fin whales, gray whales, right or bowhead whales — two species indistinguishable with the analytical method used in the study — and blue whales. With seafaring capabilities by humans
RSS