Tucked away in a lane in Gongguan (公館) close to the intersection of Roosevelt Road and Xinsheng South Road, Yangon (仰光滇緬料理) serves up delicious Burmese-style food with Thai and Yunnan influences. Owner Tsun Dai-hua (寸待華) came to Taiwan more than 30 years ago to study Chinese and liked the country so much that after a stint slicing and dicing at restaurants in Japan, he returned to Taiwan and opened up his restaurant 18 years ago. His family, which hails from Yunnan, fled to Myanmar following the Chinese Civil War.
I’ve eaten at Yangon several times over the years and have never been disappointed by its fresh and spicy food, excellent service and warm interior of terra-cotta tiled floors and dark wood tables. But it’s the restaurant’s fusion of flavors and textures that make it stand out.
Take Yangon’s seafood salad (NT$280), for example, which is more Thai than Burmese, yet doesn’t suffer as a result. Ample portions of cuttlefish, clams and shrimp are mixed with a moderate amount of tomato, onion, cucumber and chopped basil. Served with a tangy homemade chili sauce, the seafood is prepared in such a way as to bring out its different textures — firm slices of the cuttlefish contrasting nicely with the soft shrimp and chewy clams.
Photo: Noah Buchan, Taipei Times
From firm and soft to moist and crunchy, one bite of the deep-fried chicken with spicy sauce (NT$250) and you’ll understand why it ranks as one of Yangon’s most popular dishes. Not too greasy nor too oily, the chicken breast was juicy on the inside, and crispy outside. Resting on a bed of sliced cabbage and drizzled with a spicy sauce made from cilantro, garlic, ginger, chili and lime, it disappeared from the plate very quickly.
Though it might not be the prettiest dish you’ve ever seen, the flavor of the stir-fried pork (NT$220, NT$230 for chicken, NT$250 for beef) with chili paste more than makes up for its lack of aesthetic appeal. The robust chili taste is tempered by slightly acidic tomato and sweet basil. On previous visits, I’ve tried the steamed lemon perch (NT$380), which was delightfully sour, and fried chicken in coconut cream (NT$230), which I found somewhat oily and rather tasteless — the only disappointing dish I’ve ever had at the restaurant.
Yangon has four lunch specials (NT$120), which include deep-fried chicken with spicy sauce, stir-fried beef in chili paste, fried pork with bamboo shoot and Yunnan-style stir-fried pork with homemade pickles. Lunch specials come with rice, two vegetable dishes, soup and dessert. And for those of you who want to try Tsun’s recipes at home, be sure to pick up a copy of Let’s Eat Burmese Cuisine (來吃滇緬菜), his cookbook published by Kingstone (膳書房).
Photo: Noah Buchan, Taipei Times
Photo: Noah Buchan, Taipei Times
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would