In the basement of KMall in the decidedly not rockin' district around Taipei Main station, Velvet Underground's faux-industrial reception area is filled with loud music and a floor-to-ceiling print of the famously disturbing cover of King Crimson's album In the Court of Crimson. One wall of the room is open to a low-budget arcade named Cartoony World.
"This one time a little girl saw our King Crimson poster and just starting crying. It was really awkward," said the restaurant's day manager, a slender, clean-cut drummer in his late thirties who instructs me to refer to him as King Kong.
I submit that Velvet Underground, despite its poor track record with small children, is Taipei's most philanthropic combination live-rock club and rock-and-roll-themed Tai-Mex restaurant.
PHOTO: CHRIS PECHSTEDT
Its civic mindedness finds expression in its hosting of live music -- any live music -- every Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, beginning at 9pm. The stage comes equipped with everything a garage band could need, and the bands get 60 percent of the cover. (If you've ever wanted to hear jazz played on an erhu, stop by tomorrow night around 10pm.)
That food is an unabashed upscale Taiwanese reengineering of American-style Mexican food. "Asians don't like the spices," says Kong. "I've been to the US and had authentic Mexican food, but I couldn't get used to it."
Perhaps because the blend is so deliberate, the result is not incongruous. If you don't go into it expecting authenticity, you may even find it rewarding, although Kong admits that "some of our customers give us a hard time."
At Kong's recommendation, I tried the tostada and the fried mushrooms, which came in portions that were a bit small for the price. But they both blended -- successfully, I think -- Taiwanese flavors with unmistakably Mexican or American-Mexican forms and techniques.
True to its namesake, Velvet Underground, both as a restaurant and as a rock club, is cooler than it is popular. "We haven't really promoted it much," Kong said with an unconcerned expression.
Taiwan’s English education system is being pulled apart by three opposing forces. Bilingual Nation 2030 pulls students toward English and global communication. Artificial Intelligence (AI) readiness pulls them toward digital judgment, verification and AI-mediated work. But Taiwan’s old exam culture pulls them back toward memorization, grammar drills, timed reading and correct answers. If the education system keeps using old exams to define success, it risks producing graduates who are neither genuinely bilingual nor genuinely AI-ready, but trained for tasks machines can already perform. The first force is Bilingual Nation 2030. Launched in 2018, the policy aimed to “help Taiwan’s workforce connect
“Taiwan’s Opposition Leader Comes to US With a Message Straight Out of Beijing” read a May 31 headline in the Wall Street Journal. Top US administration officials and members of Congress almost certainly read the WSJ, and if there was a bullet point takeaway that people in Washington should absorb ahead of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chair Cheng Li-wun’s (鄭麗文) arrival in DC on June 9, that headline is it. The last few columns have discussed this very topic, and the timing is not coincidental. While those top officials likely do not read the Taipei Times, judging by the number
With weighty, anxiety-inducing geopolitical topics dominating the headlines, checking in on the wild and weird state of local politics can take some of the edge off. This November’s elections will determine who will be in charge of fixing potholes in your neighborhood, not the potholes in Taiwan’s complicated geopolitical space. Recently, after an online interview with a Taipei-based journalist, I commented that Taipei journalists never go further than the MRT can take them. He laughed and agreed. Naturally, the Taipei mayoral race is eating up much of the press attention. TAIPEI CITY Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate Puma Shen (沈伯洋) has
As someone who normally steers clear of books with “transcendence” or “metaphysics” in their subtitles, this reviewer — a casual observer of local belief systems since the 1990s — found Fabian Graham’s Money God Temples in Taiwan a challenging read. Those who’ve only dipped their toes into temple culture will likely need to parse several sections with special care if they’re to keep up with the author, a British ethnographic researcher whose previous books have investigated religious practices among ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia. This scholarly volume examines a facet of Taiwan’s religious landscape that didn’t exist a century ago, and
RSS