In the movie Troy, Odysseus hatches a dastardly plan to breach the besieged city's defenses. The Greeks build a wooden horse within which Achilles and a batch of soldiers hide, and the unsuspecting people of Troy take the horse into the city with dire consequences.
The plot works, Troy falls, and the movie suggests that this was the birth of the Greek nation.
Troy is now in Turkey.
PHOTO: STEVE PRICE, TAIPEI TIMES
Marketing savvy Timucin Ozcan named his new restaurant Truva, the Turkish word for Troy, and uses the Trojan horse as its logo. "I wanted to open a restaurant that reflects the true nature of the Turkish people," he said.
Truva has been open three months and has attracted a lot of local publicity. Ozcan brought in two Turkish chefs and designed the menu to reflect different types of cuisine from his native country.
A new homestyle cooking section will be added to the menu this month to supplement the current selection of Turkish food.
The decor is stylish, with atmospheric lighting, dark wooden tables and chairs. Throughout the restaurant there are references to Turkey such as a traditional dress hung in a glass case above the staircase, the national flag attached to the ceiling and an Ottoman-style rug hung on the wall.
Appetizers include spicy vegetable salad, tarator (which is yoghurt curd topped with garlic and walnuts) and egg plant salad. The main course options are dominated by kebabs and pita bread pizza.
The most famous kebab, or perhaps the most infamous, is the doner kebab. In many European cities it is associated with greasy sidewalk stalls serving up slivers of stringy meat on a thin, hard pita bread.
Truva, however, presents the doner kebab in a more traditional way. The beef that is used to form the large rotating tower of meat is marinated for one day in yoghurt and herbs, including mint. Slices are carved off and served on a soft herby pita bread. The dish is accompanied with homemade sour yoghurt. The slices of beef although cooked through are surprisingly tender, and a dollop of yoghurt augments the dish into a mouthwatering treat.
Dessert includes Turkish ice cream made using orchid root: the resulting texture is thick and creamy.
Truva has a wide selection of wines and and serves Raki, a Turkish liquor that packs a punch and has an intense licorice flavor.
Nothing like the spectacular, dramatic unraveling of a political party in Taiwan has unfolded before as has hit the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) over recent weeks. The meltdown of the New Power Party (NPP) and the self-implosion of the New Party (NP) were nothing compared to the drama playing out now involving the TPP. This ongoing saga is so interesting, this is the fifth straight column on the subject. To catch up on this train wreck of a story up to Aug. 20, search for “Donovan’s Deep Dives Ko Wen-je” in a search engine. ANN KAO SENTENCED TO PRISON YET AGAIN,
Despite her well-paying tech job, Li Daijing didn’t hesitate when her cousin asked for help running a restaurant in Mexico City. She packed up and left China for the Mexican capital last year, with dreams of a new adventure. The 30-year-old woman from Chengdu, the Sichuan provincial capital, hopes one day to start an online business importing furniture from her home country. “I want more,” Li said. “I want to be a strong woman. I want independence.” Li is among a new wave of Chinese migrants who are leaving their country in search of opportunities, more freedom or better financial prospects at a
During her final years of high school, Chinese teenager Xu Yunting found an unusual way to make some pocket money: transforming herself into male video game characters and taking their female devotees on dates. The trend, called “cos commissioning,” has gained traction in China recently, with social media posts garnering millions of views as an increasing number of young women use their purchasing power to engineer a meeting with their dream man in real life. One early morning in Shanghai last month, Xu carefully inserted contacts to enlarge her irises and adjusted a tangerine wig to transform into “Jesse,” a character from
When the Dutch began interacting with the indigenous people of Taiwan, they found that their hunters classified deer hide quality for trade using the Portuguese terms for “head,” “belly,” and “foot.” The Portuguese must have stopped here more than once to trade, but those visits have all been lost to history. They already had a colony on Macao, and did not need Taiwan to gain access to southern China or to the trade corridor that connected Japan with Manila. They were, however, the last to look at Taiwan that way. The geostrategic relationship between Taiwan and the Philippines was established
RSS