Neiwan Theater is a rustic little spot in Hsinchu County that offers Hakka cuisine and a movie.
It’s an old two-story movie theater made of wood, devised without a single beam to prop up the ceiling. A soft light warms the brown walls. Instead of rows of seats, the ground floor and upstairs hold about 20 tables, but the essentials of the theater are still there — a working projector and a respectably wide screen hanging at the front of the room.
The screening schedule isn’t posted, so which old Taiwanese film you see is a matter of chance. Some days, you could get an appetite killer like The Kinmen Bombs (823炮戰). Today, it’s Charlie Chin (秦祥林) whispering to Brigitte Lin (林青霞) in Romance of Clouds (我是一片雲), a love story that quickened heartbeats in the 1970s.
Photo: Enru Lin, Taipei Times
To go with the film, Neiwan Theater offers about 50 hot dishes created by the local population. Neiwan is a former coal-mining village that today is home mainly to the Hakka people, whose cuisine can be identified by some touchstone adjectives: salty, aromatic, heavy on the oil, economical, creative and sparked up by pickles.
Perfection (十全十美, NT$250) is most of the above. It’s an everyday version of Buddha Jumps over the Wall, a Spring Festival dish that often includes top-shelf animal products like abalone and shark fin, and vegetables like ginseng and Japanese flower mushroom. Neiwan Theater’s humbler variant uses bamboo, taro, vermicelli noodles, bits of cured ham and pork tendon, which looks to be the priciest ingredient. Though without grandeur, each component appears to have been prepared the right way — slowly and separately — so that they are equally soft and redolent with oil. The broth is as saltily rich as the shark-fin version, and Perfection still feels like a feast dish.
Neiwan Theater is famous for its betel nut flowers (檳榔花), a NT$150 dish made with the creamy white tufts growing below the leaves of a betel nut tree. These flowers are crispy and pretty palatable, with a flavor like bamboo. They are stir-fried with shaved carrots, celery, onions and some kind of mushroom, served in a hot heap glazed with a thin and delicately saline layer of oil.
Photo: Enru Lin, Taipei Times
There is an army of young servers, notably all boys under 20, who form a line outside the kitchen, taking turns collecting a dish and dispatching it in a tidy flurry of industry. This means that with each dish, you meet a new server, who leaves as quickly as he arrives.
The strangest delivery was Egg Explosion (炸蛋開花, NT$150), which are fried eggs, dressed with chili sauce and served in slices like a pizza. The best was chicken soup with mesona (仙草雞湯, NT$150), which came last. This is roughly a quarter of wild chicken stewed with a handful of goji berries and dried mesona — a small thing that imparts a sweet minty freshness and transforms the broth from good to great.
Neiwan Theater also serves most of the familiar Hakka dishes such as salted pork (客家鹹豬肉, NT$150), oiled chicken (客家油雞腿, NT$200) and prawns steamed in a bamboo case (竹筒蝦, NT$200). Classic Hakka ingredients — available to buy at the street market outside the theater — make repeat occurrences on the menu. There’s a lot of white ginger lily, a fragrant flower with a slight cinnamon aftertaste, and some funky preserved vegetables that make an appearance in eggs, soup and meats.
Photo: Enru Lin, Taipei Times
These preparations are not the most exquisite or ingenious that Hakka cuisine has to offer, but they are better than popcorn. With the reel going, meals here can stretch to three hours or more.
Photo: Enru Lin, Taipei Times
May 26 to June 1 When the Qing Dynasty first took control over many parts of Taiwan in 1684, it roughly continued the Kingdom of Tungning’s administrative borders (see below), setting up one prefecture and three counties. The actual area of control covered today’s Chiayi, Tainan and Kaohsiung. The administrative center was in Taiwan Prefecture, in today’s Tainan. But as Han settlement expanded and due to rebellions and other international incidents, the administrative units became more complex. By the time Taiwan became a province of the Qing in 1887, there were three prefectures, eleven counties, three subprefectures and one directly-administered prefecture, with
It’s an enormous dome of colorful glass, something between the Sistine Chapel and a Marc Chagall fresco. And yet, it’s just a subway station. Formosa Boulevard is the heart of Kaohsiung’s mass transit system. In metro terms, it’s modest: the only transfer station in a network with just two lines. But it’s a landmark nonetheless: a civic space that serves as much more than a point of transit. On a hot Sunday, the corridors and vast halls are filled with a market selling everything from second-hand clothes to toys and house decorations. It’s just one of the many events the station hosts,
Two moves show Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) is gunning for Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) party chair and the 2028 presidential election. Technically, these are not yet “officially” official, but by the rules of Taiwan politics, she is now on the dance floor. Earlier this month Lu confirmed in an interview in Japan’s Nikkei that she was considering running for KMT chair. This is not new news, but according to reports from her camp she previously was still considering the case for and against running. By choosing a respected, international news outlet, she declared it to the world. While the outside world
Through art and storytelling, La Benida Hui empowers children to become environmental heroes, using everything from SpongeBob to microorganisms to reimagine their relationship with nature. “I tell the students that they have superpowers. It needs to be emphasized that their choices can make a difference,” says Hui, an environmental artist and education specialist. For her second year as Badou Elementary’s artist in residence, Hui leads creative lessons on environmental protection, where students reflect on their relationship with nature and transform beach waste into artworks. Standing in lush green hills overlooking the ocean with land extending into the intertidal zone, the school in Keelung
RSS