The first two characters in the name of Chu Cha Dan Fan (初茶淡飯) mean a first taste of tea and are a play on a Chinese idiom that refers to a humble meal. The name cannot be more appropriate for this restaurant that serves rare "tea cuisine" in a cozy dining environment.
Neighboring a dozen coffee houses in an alley off Liaoning Street night market, this restaurant has a door hidden by leafy greenery and a quaint interior like a 1930s Shanghai teahouse. As soon as diners enter, they are deeply submerged in a retro atmosphere created by old Chinese pop songs and walls displaying antique Chinese posters of smiling calendar girls in traditional dress. The wooden Buddha carvings, the owner's collection of jade and the flowing calligraphy that fill every corner of the restaurant all add to the classically Oriental feel.
PHOTO: VICO LEE, TAIPEI TIMES
The restaurant's special tea cuisine is the innovation of owner and chef Hsieh Chang-chuo (謝長輈), who conceived of the restaurant after years of working as a chef in Chinese restaurants in Holland and Belgium.
"Traditionally, only a couple of Chinese dishes are made with tea. The way Westerners eat seafood with white wine and beef with red wine inspired me to cook meat with a variety of green or black tea," Hsieh said. The appeal of tea cuisine is its many benefits to health. "All kinds of meat are acidic. The alkali in tea can help neutralize this, making the dish more suitable for the human body," Hsieh added.
Hsieh's signature dish is dong po pork (東坡罈肉, NT$260), a favorite among foreign customers to the restaurant. Improving on the famous Chinese dish, Hsieh stews the fatty pork with pu-er tea (普洱茶), which helps cut the grease from the meat. People who would usually wince at the sight of fatty pork will be surprised by its light and non-greasy taste, so different from the artery-clogging, soy sauce-heavy fatty pork found in most other restaurants.
Chicken in tea (茶露雞, NT$260) is a twist on drunken chicken (醉雞), another traditional dish. By marinating the chicken in tieh kuanyin tea (鐵觀音茶), instead of wine, Hsieh creates a refreshing and beautiful dish with snow-colored meat and crystal skin.
Other tea-flavored dishes include chicken in black tea, bao chung shrimp(包種蝦仁) and pu-er beef, which uses vintage 12-year-old Yunnan tea.
The restaurant also provides Sichuan dishes such as kung pao chicken(宮保雞丁) and medicinal stews like Tian Shan hsueh lian chicken (天山雪蓮雞). The latter, using chicken legs boiled in ginseng and other traditional herbs, is only served in winter.
Although it opened only 10 months ago without much fanfare, the restaurant already has a loyal clientele who crowd the place during and long after meals.
US President Donald Trump may have hoped for an impromptu talk with his old friend Kim Jong-un during a recent trip to Asia, but analysts say the increasingly emboldened North Korean despot had few good reasons to join the photo-op. Trump sent repeated overtures to Kim during his barnstorming tour of Asia, saying he was “100 percent” open to a meeting and even bucking decades of US policy by conceding that North Korea was “sort of a nuclear power.” But Pyongyang kept mum on the invitation, instead firing off missiles and sending its foreign minister to Russia and Belarus, with whom it
When Taiwan was battered by storms this summer, the only crumb of comfort I could take was knowing that some advice I’d drafted several weeks earlier had been correct. Regarding the Southern Cross-Island Highway (南橫公路), a spectacular high-elevation route connecting Taiwan’s southwest with the country’s southeast, I’d written: “The precarious existence of this road cannot be overstated; those hoping to drive or ride all the way across should have a backup plan.” As this article was going to press, the middle section of the highway, between Meishankou (梅山口) in Kaohsiung and Siangyang (向陽) in Taitung County, was still closed to outsiders
Many people noticed the flood of pro-China propaganda across a number of venues in recent weeks that looks like a coordinated assault on US Taiwan policy. It does look like an effort intended to influence the US before the meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese dictator Xi Jinping (習近平) over the weekend. Jennifer Kavanagh’s piece in the New York Times in September appears to be the opening strike of the current campaign. She followed up last week in the Lowy Interpreter, blaming the US for causing the PRC to escalate in the Philippines and Taiwan, saying that as
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has a dystopian, radical and dangerous conception of itself. Few are aware of this very fundamental difference between how they view power and how the rest of the world does. Even those of us who have lived in China sometimes fall back into the trap of viewing it through the lens of the power relationships common throughout the rest of the world, instead of understanding the CCP as it conceives of itself. Broadly speaking, the concepts of the people, race, culture, civilization, nation, government and religion are separate, though often overlapping and intertwined. A government
RSS