A good restaurant feeds the body, but a great restaurant feeds the soul, transporting it to another place or time. The Astoria in Taipei's Wuchang Street is like a portal that takes diners back in time to 1949, to the kind of respectable cafe our Western grandmothers dressed up to lunch at. It provides a feast for the senses with its classic recipes, as well as a few new surprises.
The Astoria was reopened in July by the same family that has kept the bakery downstairs going for 55 years, to the delight of the culturati who had made the place their second home (and like family, patriarch Archiybold Chien fed some of the writers and artists in their lean years). One booth has photos of its longtime literary denizens.
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ASTORIA
But the food stands up to the challenge of recreating a past. Four salads are offered in the mid-NT$200 price range, including a chef's salad, Russian, Caesar and fruit. The Caesar was satisfying, served with four helmeted but naked prawns. The tiny croutons, bacon and romaine were all perfectly crisp, with a dressing more sweet than redolent of garlic and anchovy.
The smoked salmon spaghetti turned out to be a handsomely made plate of fettucine topped with a wide slice of smoked salmon. Underneath were chunks of fresh salmon in a cream sauce, with a rainbow of delicately julienned peppers and onions.
The "course" menu offers fried meats and seafoods for NT$280 to NT$350. Specials (found not on the menu but on a tabletop card in Chinese only) top the price range with steak and lamb, both NT$580. They also include beef cooked in red wine for NT$380 and something that was described to me as "pancakes with cheese and vegetables" for NT$300.
This turned out to be a surprise -- a large plateful of quesadillas, served with a creamy sauce (that wasn't sour cream) and sweet salsa heady with oregano but lacking the usual smoky cumin. A slight afterburn comes from the canned jalapenos in the lighter-than-tortilla crepes, filled with chicken, cheese and julienned vegetables. You're not in the 1950s anymore. Rounding out the offerings are numerous varieties of coffee, the bakery's pastries and fruit frappes.
This is the place to take your visiting family when they've tired of noisy Chinese restaurants and want to catch their breath.
May 11 to May 18 The original Taichung Railway Station was long thought to have been completely razed. Opening on May 15, 1905, the one-story wooden structure soon outgrew its purpose and was replaced in 1917 by a grandiose, Western-style station. During construction on the third-generation station in 2017, workers discovered the service pit for the original station’s locomotive depot. A year later, a small wooden building on site was determined by historians to be the first stationmaster’s office, built around 1908. With these findings, the Taichung Railway Station Cultural Park now boasts that it has
Wooden houses wedged between concrete, crumbling brick facades with roofs gaping to the sky, and tiled art deco buildings down narrow alleyways: Taichung Central District’s (中區) aging architecture reveals both the allure and reality of the old downtown. From Indigenous settlement to capital under Qing Dynasty rule through to Japanese colonization, Taichung’s Central District holds a long and layered history. The bygone beauty of its streets once earned it the nickname “Little Kyoto.” Since the late eighties, however, the shifting of economic and government centers westward signaled a gradual decline in the area’s evolving fortunes. With the regeneration of the once
In February of this year the Taipei Times reported on the visit of Lienchiang County Commissioner Wang Chung-ming (王忠銘) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and a delegation to a lantern festival in Fuzhou’s Mawei District in Fujian Province. “Today, Mawei and Matsu jointly marked the lantern festival,” Wang was quoted as saying, adding that both sides “being of one people,” is a cause for joy. Wang was passing around a common claim of officials of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the PRC’s allies and supporters in Taiwan — KMT and the Taiwan People’s Party — and elsewhere: Taiwan and
Perched on Thailand’s border with Myanmar, Arunothai is a dusty crossroads town, a nowheresville that could be the setting of some Southeast Asian spaghetti Western. Its main street is the final, dead-end section of the two-lane highway from Chiang Mai, Thailand’s second largest city 120kms south, and the heart of the kingdom’s mountainous north. At the town boundary, a Chinese-style arch capped with dragons also bears Thai script declaring fealty to Bangkok’s royal family: “Long live the King!” Further on, Chinese lanterns line the main street, and on the hillsides, courtyard homes sit among warrens of narrow, winding alleyways and
RSS