Taipei’s five-star hotels have reopened their buffet restaurants at discounted charges to boost food sales after authorities last month gave the green light to conditional dine-in services.
Buffet restaurants, the main driver of hotels’ food revenue, have continued to be hit hard by social distancing requirements that ban guests from picking up food on their own to their heart’s content. Rather, waitstaff put the food on customers’ plates or customers place an order and waitstaff deliver to their table.
Shangri-La’s Far Eastern Plaza Hotel Taipei (台北遠東國際大飯店) yesterday reopened its buffet restaurant Cafe (遠東Cafe) and adopted the former style. It also gives guests a 25 percent discount coupon for use on their next visit. The coupons are valid until next month.
Photo provided by the Shangri-La Far Eastern Tainan
Latest Recipe (探索廚房), the upscale buffet restaurant of Le Meridien Taipei (台北寒舍艾美酒店) in Xinyi District (信義) follows the second model after the city allowed conditional in-dining on Aug. 3.
The restaurant is seeking to digest dining coupons it sold last year by inflating their value by 20 percent until the end of this month.
Restaurants are expecting better revenue next month, when the government rolls out its Quintuple Stimulus Vouchers program to invigorate domestic demand.
Taipei Garden Hotel (台北花園大酒店) near the city’s Ximen MRT Station has lowered charges to NT$599 per head from NT$899 for its buffet restaurant To-Gather Kitchen (饗聚廚房) with an extra free plate of roast beef at all meal times.
Its Prime One steak house offers guests who order set meals a full-lobster dish for NT$680. Guests may also use NT$1,000 in cash to pay for NT$1,300 of food and wine.
The US dollar was trading at NT$29.7 at 10am today on the Taipei Foreign Exchange, as the New Taiwan dollar gained NT$1.364 from the previous close last week. The NT dollar continued to rise today, after surging 3.07 percent on Friday. After opening at NT$30.91, the NT dollar gained more than NT$1 in just 15 minutes, briefly passing the NT$30 mark. Before the US Department of the Treasury's semi-annual currency report came out, expectations that the NT dollar would keep rising were already building. The NT dollar on Friday closed at NT$31.064, up by NT$0.953 — a 3.07 percent single-day gain. Today,
‘SHORT TERM’: The local currency would likely remain strong in the near term, driven by anticipated US trade pressure, capital inflows and expectations of a US Fed rate cut The US dollar is expected to fall below NT$30 in the near term, as traders anticipate increased pressure from Washington for Taiwan to allow the New Taiwan dollar to appreciate, Cathay United Bank (國泰世華銀行) chief economist Lin Chi-chao (林啟超) said. Following a sharp drop in the greenback against the NT dollar on Friday, Lin told the Central News Agency that the local currency is likely to remain strong in the short term, driven in part by market psychology surrounding anticipated US policy pressure. On Friday, the US dollar fell NT$0.953, or 3.07 percent, closing at NT$31.064 — its lowest level since Jan.
Hong Kong authorities ramped up sales of the local dollar as the greenback’s slide threatened the foreign-exchange peg. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) sold a record HK$60.5 billion (US$7.8 billion) of the city’s currency, according to an alert sent on its Bloomberg page yesterday in Asia, after it tested the upper end of its trading band. That added to the HK$56.1 billion of sales versus the greenback since Friday. The rapid intervention signals efforts from the city’s authorities to limit the local currency’s moves within its HK$7.75 to HK$7.85 per US dollar trading band. Heavy sales of the local dollar by
The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday met with some of the nation’s largest insurance companies as a skyrocketing New Taiwan dollar piles pressure on their hundreds of billions of dollars in US bond investments. The commission has asked some life insurance firms, among the biggest Asian holders of US debt, to discuss how the rapidly strengthening NT dollar has impacted their operations, people familiar with the matter said. The meeting took place as the NT dollar jumped as much as 5 percent yesterday, its biggest intraday gain in more than three decades. The local currency surged as exporters rushed to
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