The fish market located on Taipei’s Minzu East Road, close to the intersection with Jianguo North Road, has long been popular with foodies seeking quality seafood. But the cooked food section, a rather grubby, haphazard affair, was a letdown.
This is about to change as management of a large swath of the market has been handed to the Mitsui Food and Beverage Enterprise Group (三井餐飲事業集團), which operates a number of top Japanese restaurants across town. The company’s first move was to open Addiction Aquatic Development, a sophisticated sushi and Japanese grill restaurant that mixes high-end styling with an edgy marketplace atmosphere.
The first thing that visitors are likely to notice is that the sushi bar does not provide seating. (The grill section has seating located outside, under a high awning.) This is a bold move, but one that clearly works. Arriving for lunch at 3pm on a weekday, the bar was still over three-quarters full, and no one seemed in any hurry to leave.
Photo: Ian Bartholomew, Taipei Times
For anyone not familiar with the arcana of raw fish cuisine, the restaurant’s selection could easily be overwhelming.
If ordering your own nigiri (raw fish on rice) platter is too much of an ordeal, the special nigiri selection (特選握壽司, NT$600) is highly recommended. It consists of around 14 pieces and is a perfect introduction to what Addiction Aquatic Development has to offer.
The nigiri platter can be ordered with a variety of other menu options, including items from the grill. (In the sushi section, grilled items are cooked in the kitchen, but in the grill section, diners have their own super-heated stones on which to cook their selection.)
A charcoal grilled medium-sized rosy sea bass with salt (中紅喉鹽燒, NT$200) was a finally judged piece of work: tender, juicy, flavorsome and perfectly seasoned. The low-end Pacific saury prepared in the same fashion (秋刀魚鹽燒, NT$50) revealed that the kitchen has as an assured touch with cheap fish as it does with the more refined types.
Nigiri takes pride of place at the sushi bar, and it is worth noting that Mitsui has brought in an award-winning nigiri chef from Japan to oversee operations. The style of nigiri served at Addiction Aquatic Development, which favors large pieces of fish over a very small dab of rice, is described as being rather “macho” (男子漢氣魄的握壽司) by food writer Wang Ray-yau (王瑞瑤). Fishy flavors are allowed a pretty free rein. I found the salmon roe and sea urchin to be particularly fine. While there might be some room for argument about the exact ranking of Addiction Aquatic Development in Taipei, a city with many outstanding Japanese restaurants, the general agreement on the Web is that the price-to-quality ratio is admirable.
Service was adequate but a ridiculous system by which you need to pay with each new order seriously disrupts the natural rhythm of dining. I ended up with four separate checks, as I added to my order when I saw or tasted something that took my fancy.
Friends visiting during the lunchtime rush experienced mistakes in their orders and long delays in delivery. The use of particularly low-quality, disposable chopsticks also seems an unnecessary concession to the street, especially when few diners would be paying less than NT$500 for their meal, with many forking out considerably more.
A variety of sakes is available, though nothing of any exceptional quality can be found on the menu. This is aggravating given that the supermarket section just outside the restaurant (where various Japanese culinary materials and raw and frozen seafood is available) stocks a fine selection.
Many Web sites show the restaurant as opening until 9pm, but according to staff, during the soft opening currently in effect, both sushi and grill segments will only open until 5pm.
Last week, Viola Zhou published a marvelous deep dive into the culture clash between Taiwanese boss mentality and American labor practices at the Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) plant in Arizona in Rest of World. “The American engineers complained of rigid, counterproductive hierarchies at the company,” while the Taiwanese said American workers aren’t dedicated. The article is a delight, but what it is depicting is the clash between a work culture that offers employee autonomy and at least nods at work-life balance, and one that runs on hierarchical discipline enforced by chickenshit. And it runs on chickenshit because chickenshit is a cultural
By far the most jarring of the new appointments for the incoming administration is that of Tseng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) to head the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF). That is a huge demotion for one of the most powerful figures in the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Tseng has one of the most impressive resumes in the party. He was very active during the Wild Lily Movement and his generation is now the one taking power. He has served in many of the requisite government, party and elected positions to build out a solid political profile. Elected as mayor of Taoyuan as part of the
April 29 to May 5 One month before the Taipei-Keelung New Road (北基新路) was set to open, the news that US general Douglas MacArthur had died, reached Taiwan. The military leader saw Taiwan as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” that was of huge strategic value to the US. He’d been a proponent of keeping it out of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) hands. Coupled with the fact that the US had funded more than 50 percent of the road’s construction costs, the authorities at the last minute renamed it the MacArthur Thruway (麥帥公路) for his “great contributions to the free world and deep
Moritz Mieg, 22, lay face down in the rubble, the ground shaking violently beneath him. Boulders crashed down around him, some stones hitting his back. “I just hoped that it would be one big hit and over, because I did not want to be hit nearly to death and then have to slowly die,” the student from Germany tells Taipei Times. MORNING WALK Early on April 3, Mieg set out on a scenic hike through Taroko Gorge in Hualien County (花蓮). It was a fine day for it. Little did he know that the complex intersection of tectonic plates Taiwan sits