The 7Yunnan (七彩雲南) restaurant chain is operated by a woman from a Chinese minority group, and it serves cuisine from her native Yunnan Province at five locations across Taoyuan County.
At the Bade (八德) location, the dining area is warmly lit and adorned with colorful handicrafts, such as a collection of candy apple-red hats woven by the Dai (傣) people, sourced from Yunnan province.
Dishes arrive briskly — often with a story. Like this one, about Crossing the Bridge Noodles (過橋米線, NT$100): A woman in Yunnan invented it to keep her husband at peak health while he studied alone for the imperial exams. To get to his dormitory, she had to travel over a long bridge, so she created a soup that would stay piping hot and carried the meal in an earthen pot.
Photo: Enru Lin, Taipei Times
This is the best-selling dish at 7Yunnan, and it is also one of the best-known from the province. The Taoyuan version is also served in an earthen pot. It contains chicken broth with thin meat slices, rice noodles, julienned carrots, garlic and cilantro and a glistening layer of clarified fat to trap heat. You can request that it all arrive in the pot, or have the ingredients brought out separately so you can cook them on your own, hot-pot style. Either way, it’s a comforting and filling dish that you can eat a lot of because the broth is velvety and subtle, salted in a mildly pleasant way.
Other menu items are spiced much more heavily. 7Yunnan has a few dishes similar to Sichuan food: firecracker colored soups, meats showered with peppercorns that range from spirited to incendiary. There are also dishes that are sweet and sour, or intensely salty and savory, in the way of the better-known Vietnamese or Thai cuisines.
The butter-battered soft-shell crab (奶香黃薑蟹, NT$250) has Thai influences and came highly recommended by the server. This dish — steaming, flavorful and very tender chunks of crab — is very magical, though it’s also a shock of trans fats that could delete two days from your life expectancy. It consists of roughly chopped soft-shell crabs, encrusted in a deep-fried spiced batter that includes fresh ginger, and topped with crispy fried basil.
Photo: Enru Lin, Taipei Times
Moon Shrimp Cake (月亮蝦餅, NT$200) is a second dish that you could also find at a Thai restaurant. It’s a standard eight triangles arranged like a star around a dipping sauce, but the thin little pancakes are made from scratch and embedded with morsels of real shrimp.
In addition, 7Yunnan serves foods native to the large population of minority peoples in Yunnan. The squid cold plate (傣味拌花枝, NT$180), borrowed from the Dai people, arrives looking like an inexpert onion-rich stir fry, though in reality it’s pretty thoughtfully composed. The sharpness has been drawn out of the onion with a vinegar marinade, and the onion combines with the celery and baby tomatoes to create a sweetly tart punch. The squid is springy, but with a flatlining saltiness on its own. When that’s eaten with a bit of the vegetable haystack, nearly all the flavors are there, in a funky, refreshing dish that’s a lot like ceviche.
Photo: Enru Lin, Taipei Times
Photo: Enru Lin, Taipei Times
Photo: Enru Lin, Taipei Times
Sept.16 to Sept. 22 The “anti-communist train” with then-president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) face plastered on the engine puffed along the “sugar railway” (糖業鐵路) in May 1955, drawing enthusiastic crowds at 103 stops covering nearly 1,200km. An estimated 1.58 million spectators were treated to propaganda films, plays and received free sugar products. By this time, the state-run Taiwan Sugar Corporation (台糖, Taisugar) had managed to connect the previously separate east-west lines established by Japanese-era sugar factories, allowing the anti-communist train to travel easily from Taichung to Pingtung’s Donggang Township (東港). Last Sunday’s feature (Taiwan in Time: The sugar express) covered the inauguration of the
The corruption cases surrounding former Taipei Mayor and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) head Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) are just one item in the endless cycle of noise and fuss obscuring Taiwan’s deep and urgent structural and social problems. Even the case itself, as James Baron observed in an excellent piece at the Diplomat last week, is only one manifestation of the greater problem of deep-rooted corruption in land development. Last week the government announced a program to permit 25,000 foreign university students, primarily from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, to work in Taiwan after graduation for 2-4 years. That number is a
In a stark demonstration of how award-winning breakthroughs can come from the most unlikely directions, researchers have won an Ig Nobel prize for discovering that mammals can breathe through their anuses. After a series of tests on mice, rats and pigs, Japanese scientists found the animals absorb oxygen delivered through the rectum, work that underpins a clinical trial to see whether the procedure can treat respiratory failure. The team is among 10 recognized in this year’s Ig Nobel awards (see below for more), the irreverent accolades given for achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” They are not
This Qing Dynasty trail takes hikers from renowned hot springs in the East Rift Valley, up to the top of the Coastal Mountain Range, and down to the Pacific Short vacations to eastern Taiwan often require choosing between the Rift Valley with its pineapple fields, rice paddies and broader range of amenities, or the less populated coastal route for its ocean scenery. For those who can’t decide, why not try both? The Antong Traversing Trail (安通越嶺道) provides just such an opportunity. Built 149 years ago, the trail linked up these two formerly isolated parts of the island by crossing over the Coastal Mountain Range. After decades of serving as a convenient path for local Amis, Han settlers, missionaries and smugglers, the trail fell into disuse once modern roadways were built