Evans Burger, Awesome Burger, Burger Ray — Taipei’s foodie scene has been spawning burger joints lately for whatever reason. Passing fad or not – Burger Fix recently closed after being in business for slightly over a year — time will soon tell, but one joint that has flown under the radar is Mount Kao Sandwich Shop (漫高三明治).
Opened a year and a half ago, the tiny glass-walled corner shop lies hidden in a narrow lane by the Technology Building MRT. Don’t be fooled by the whiff of Japanese pancakes coming from the vendor next door. Mount Kao serves burgers and sandwiches — lots of it. Inside is industrial and minimalistic — a wooden bar top displaying locally brewed craft beer, compact tables and chairs arranged for intimate seating and floor-to-ceiling blackboards showing off their hand-written menu.
The burgers and sandwiches are indeed as tall as mountains, as Mount Kao’s Chinese name suggests (gao, 高, or kao as it is spelled in the Wade Giles Romanization system, means “tall”).
Photo: Dana Ter, Taipei Times
I go for the mounted cheeseburger ciabatta (NT$240) and decide to make it a double, which means extra cheese, bacon and a double layer of egg and meat for an added NT$90. The two slabs of 4oz meat are tender and chewy. I wasn’t sure what to think of the cooked egg white occupying the center of the meat (the meat is sliced like the shape of the bagel with a hole in the center), but the egg worked amazingly well, lending gooey texture and moistening the palate.
The bacon added extra crunch and saltiness, though the cheese could have been a little runnier. The arugula in the burger was a surprisingly nice touch – much fancier and more multi-dimensional flavor and texture-wise than basic lettuce. Its natural pepperiness complements the other ingredients.
Normally, I detest side salads in burger joints — my theory is that they’re just slapped on to make customers feel less guilty of ingesting so much red meat — but Mount Kao’s isn’t bad. For one, it doesn’t come with overly sweet dressing, but with a tasteful dollop of vinaigrette instead, separate from the salad. The burger also comes with a side — either fries, wedges or sweet potatoes. I choose the fries, thinking that sweet potatoes with burger might be an odd combination. It’s a good choice as the fries are warm and crispy. All of this I wash down with a banana milkshake topped with cinnamon (NT$110), which is rich, creamy and divine.
Photo: Dana Ter, Taipei Times
My friend wishes to order the tarragon chicken salad sub (NT$195) but they’re out of tarragon chicken that day. Dismayed, he settles for the mushroom shrimp grilled sandwich (NT$245), which did not disappoint. The bread is warm and crisp, the mushrooms succulent and juicy, the shrimp chewy while the tomato adds some juiciness. I found the bacon bits to be a nice surprise — salty, crunchy — though I probably would have appreciated it better had I not already eaten so much from my own burger. Thick and creamy, the garlic mayo sauce brings the other elements in the sandwich together.
Because there just isn’t enough meat to go around, we also order a side of fried meatballs (NT$150). The granules of meat on the outer layer are discernably crunchy. Inside is warm and chewy while the barbecue sauce makes for a hearty dip.
Mount Kao certainly lives up to its name. While I certainly relished their monster-sized burgers and sandwiches — every last morsel of it — that was a lot of meat and I might have to stay away from burgers for a while.
Photo: Dana Ter, Taipei Times
The US war on Iran has illuminated the deep interdependence of Asia on flows of oil and related items as raw materials that become the basis of modern human civilization. Australians and New Zealanders had a wake up call. The crisis also emphasizes how the Philippines is a swatch of islands linked by jet fuel. These revelations have deep implications for an invasion of Taiwan. Much of the commentary on the Taiwan scenario has looked at the disruptions to world trade, which will be in the trillions. However, the Iran war offers additional specific lessons for a Taiwan scenario. An insightful
The problem with Marx’s famous remark that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, the second time as farce, is that the first time is usually farce as well. This week Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chair Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) made a pilgrimage to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) “to confer, converse and otherwise hob-nob” with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials. The visit was an instant international media hit, with major media reporting almost entirely shorn of context. “Taiwan’s main opposition leader landed in China Tuesday for a rare visit aimed at cross-strait ‘peace’”, crowed Agence-France Presse (AFP) from Shanghai. Rare!
April 6 to April 13 Few expected a Japanese manga adaptation featuring four tall, long-haired heartthrobs and a plucky heroine to transform Taiwan’s television industry. But Meteor Garden (流星花園) took the nation by storm after premiering on April 12, 2001, single-handedly creating the “idol drama” (偶像劇) craze that captivated young viewers across Asia. The show was so successful that Japan produced its own remake in 2005, followed by South Korea, China and Thailand. Other channels quickly followed suit, with more than 50 such shows appearing over the following two years. Departing from the melodramatic
Sunflower movement superstar Lin Fei-fan (林飛帆) once quipped that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) could nominate a watermelon to run for Tainan mayor and win. Conversely, the DPP could run a living saint for mayor in Taipei and still lose. In 2022, the DPP ran with the closest thing to a living saint they could find: former Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中). During the pandemic, his polling was astronomically high, with the approval of his performance reaching as high as 91 percent in one TVBS poll. He was such a phenomenon that people printed out pop-up cartoon
RSS