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.
Sept. 1 to Sept. 7 In 1899, Kozaburo Hirai became the first documented Japanese to wed a Taiwanese under colonial rule. The soldier was partly motivated by the government’s policy of assimilating the Taiwanese population through intermarriage. While his friends and family disapproved and even mocked him, the marriage endured. By 1930, when his story appeared in Tales of Virtuous Deeds in Taiwan, Hirai had settled in his wife’s rural Changhua hometown, farming the land and integrating into local society. Similarly, Aiko Fujii, who married into the prominent Wufeng Lin Family (霧峰林家) in 1927, quickly learned Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) and
The low voter turnout for the referendum on Aug. 23 shows that many Taiwanese are apathetic about nuclear energy, but there are long-term energy stakes involved that the public needs to grasp Taiwan faces an energy trilemma: soaring AI-driven demand, pressure to cut carbon and reliance on fragile fuel imports. But the nuclear referendum on Aug. 23 showed how little this registered with voters, many of whom neither see the long game nor grasp the stakes. Volunteer referendum worker Vivian Chen (陳薇安) put it bluntly: “I’ve seen many people asking what they’re voting for when they arrive to vote. They cast their vote without even doing any research.” Imagine Taiwanese voters invited to a poker table. The bet looked simple — yes or no — yet most never showed. More than two-thirds of those
In the run-up to the referendum on re-opening Pingtung County’s Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant last month, the media inundated us with explainers. A favorite factoid of the international media, endlessly recycled, was that Taiwan has no energy reserves for a blockade, thus necessitating re-opening the nuclear plants. As presented by the Chinese-language CommonWealth Magazine, it runs: “According to the US Department of Commerce International Trade Administration, 97.73 percent of Taiwan’s energy is imported, and estimates are that Taiwan has only 11 days of reserves available in the event of a blockade.” This factoid is not an outright lie — that
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) yesterday paraded its military hardware in an effort to impress its own population, intimidate its enemies and rewrite history. As always, this was paced by a blizzard of articles and commentaries in the media, a reminder that Beijing’s lies must be accompanied by a bodyguard of lies. A typical example is this piece by Zheng Wang (汪錚) of Seton Hall in the Diplomat. “In Taiwan, 2025 also marks 80 years since the island’s return to China at the end of the war — a historical milestone largely omitted in official commemorations.” The reason for its
RSS