Gilley’s Restaurant (天母盛鑫) opened in 1979 in Tienmu, where it made a local name on German pork knuckle and glossy rib-eye steaks eaten with a pinch of salt and nothing else.
Since then, the European-style restaurant has moved to Zhongshan N Rd (中山北路) in Shilin and opened a new location inside the Miramar Entertainment Park.
The Miramar location is the smaller of the two. Its compact single room seats about 40 at slender wooden tables and chairs covered in a crimson felt. This decor creates an elegant salon look, interrupted by an enlarged photograph of a pork knuckle and some large clownfish-colored fluorescent lamps arranged at the very back in the shape of Xs. The lamps glow softly and oddly, and from the fifth-floor shopping concourse looking in, the restaurant is a big weird box of light.
Photo: Enru Lin, Taipei Times
The menu here offers mainly set meals, plus a few appetizers and soup items a la carte. Sets range from NT$380 (vegetable risotto with cream sauce) to NT$780 (roasted steak with crayfish), and include bread, salad, an appetizer, dessert and a beverage.
First from the kitchen is a hot puffy roll meant to be eaten with garlic butter sitting on the table in a ramekin. The butter comes out thick on the knife but melts easily, and the flavor is surprising, herblike before rounding out into a light sweetness.
Next up is a romaine salad tossed in a tart vinegar dressing; and then soup, a sturdy bowl of corn chowder that’s an interpretation of western corn chowder featuring Hokkaido cream (NT$120 a la carte).
Photo: Enru Lin, Taipei Times
The appetizer arrives in three parts: From left to right on the plate, there’s a whorl of goose liver mousse on a one-bite slice on flaky toast; a slightly warm, subtly smoked frisson of Norwegian smoked salmon; and a dish filled with a bit of chewy snail in tomato sauce and melted mozzarella. They look unappetizing and gaudy on the plate, but the flavors go together like a deconstructed pizza.
Gilley’s real standouts are meats prepared simply but remarkably. German pork knuckle with in-house sauerkraut (NT$680), one of Gilley’s enduring trophy items, comes out on the plate as a gorgeous golden parcel with no excess fat. This is a particularly large pork knuckle that’s baked and then flash-fried into a golden crisp. The exterior is rough and crispy, and the inside is juicy, with a blooming porkiness and soft texture that falls apart under the knife.
The Frenched lamb shoulder rack (NT$680) is also a good cut prepared in an extraordinary way. Each order is two ribs that come with a small side of mashed potatoes and thick drops of mint sauce arranged in a horseshoe formation on the plate. When they arrive, they are well-rested and warm, not hot, rimmed with only a slight strip of fat and browned beautifully with no carbonization on top.
Photo: Enru Lin, Taipei Times
Beverages include juices, coffee and teas like chrysanthemum (NT$120) and a fruity Lady Grey (NT$120). There’s Heineken and Corona, but no wine list. Upon request, waitstaff push out a cart and can help pair meats with white and red wines ranging from NT$550 to NT$1,100.
Photo: Enru Lin, Taipei Times
Photo: Enru Lin, 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
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
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