Guang Wu Organic Village (光武有機村) is located just off the Zhuangwei Interchange (壯圍交流道) of National Highway No. 5 (國道五號) in Yilan County. This location makes it ideal for day-trippers from Taipei looking for a bit of rural idyll without any inconvenience, as they can blast through the Hsuehshan Tunnel and be parked out front of the restaurant inside an hour. If you ignore the elevated highway nearby, Guang Wu’s immediate surroundings are rural in the extreme, with no more than a few clusters of homes dotted across a landscape composed primarily of paddy fields.
The restaurant itself does not look very different from the local farmhouses, and the interior is decorated after the conventions of a mid-range Chinese banquet restaurant, with a preponderance of large round tables and chairs in cloth covers providing a hint of luxury.
The main restaurant area is poorly lit, but the extension were I dined had picture windows overlooking the fields.
Photo: Ian Bartholomew, Taipei Times
For the lazy diner, the advantage of Guang Wu Organic Village is that it does not have a menu. A set is provided at a pre-arranged tariff, the lowest being NT$600 a head. On the day I visited, an NT$800 option was also available.
Guang Wu Organic Village’s reputation rests on its healthy and “creative” cuisine and the quality of the ingredients it uses, some harvested from its own farmland, the rest bought fresh each day. I had no argument with any of this, though the banquet-style presentation was less than successful, and for a couple of dishes, innovation had clearly gotten the better of culinary integrity.
The center piece of the NT$600 meal was a creamy hot pot that clearly wanted to impress with the quantity of its fresh vegetables, including a variety of mushrooms, some delightfully sweet cabbage, root vegetables, and two paltry shrimp. The rich white stock tasted a tad oily on the tongue, and neither the vegetables nor the seafood shone. On the other hand, a bowl of egg fried rice with tasty shredded pork and crispy seaweed was excellent. Served cold, it was like a rice salad, and while I found this rather pleasant for a summer’s day, my Taiwanese dining companion was distinctly put off by the very idea of cold fried rice.
Meanwhile, a leaf salad with Japanese dressing was very refreshing, and the kindly waitress pointed out which of the ingredients were homegrown, but a web of spun sugar on top of the salad did not serve any useful purpose.
A thick soup of crab and abalone dumplings was an interesting twist on geng (羹), a dish often found served with cuttlefish at night markets, but here elevated by a more subtle combination of flavors. On a more disappointing note, the restaurant’s thinly sliced beef served over fresh lettuce came on a big flat platter, but unfortunately the sauce was too thin, and ran in an unsightly puddle across the surface.
The restaurant seemed to be better at dealing with larger tables, where its banquet aspirations had greater scope for expression. A sashimi platter served in a wooden boat had a table of 10 gasping with admiration, and other big platters looked equally impressive.
At the end of the meal, Guang Wu Organic Village gave the impression of being an uncomfortable mix of a number of elements. Good ingredients and skill were marred by occasional thoughtlessness, and the desire to impress superseded a real commitment to the food. The popularity of the restaurant, measured by the very respectable crowd that was dining at this out-of-the-way location during a mid-week lunchtime, suggests that it certainly meets the demands of a certain section of the dining public, but I did not feel that it quite hit the mark from either the creative or the local/organic food angle.
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