When I stepped into DS Music Restaurant, I found it to be an extremely well-put-together, professional establishment with good food and a pleasant atmosphere that is night-lifey but not overwhelming. This disturbed me.
The reader is invited to consider the nurse fetish. It is an institution that lies at the heart of DS. And so I entered DS prepared to immerse myself in sleaze and then write ironically about it. What I found, though, was a disquietingly congruous marriage of unabashed hedonism and well-funded good taste.
Overall, DS looks like many other posh restaurant-and-bars, with lots of spot lighting, funny-shaped chairs, and clear alcohol bottles lit from underneath. Except that many of the tables look like sleek hospital beds, there are a few wheelchairs and crutches sitting around, backlit X-rays decorate some walls, and above each table hangs a big "IV drip," which functions like a small keg. And then, of course, there are nurses everywhere you look.
PHOTO COURTESY OF DS MUSIC RESTAURANT
The hospital theme is pervasive, but somehow subtle, or at least natural. I never thought I would say this, but it turns out that a wheelchair does not look out of place next to a wall of Smirnoff Ice bottles. There is something appealing about the audacity of taking a concept as (someone has to say it) flagrantly trashy as this and making something so cool out of it. To top it off, the food is good.
The menu consists of lightly Westernized Chinese, Japanese and Thai, with an inexplicable but not unwelcome Polynesian flare running through the presentation. The sashimi, for example, is served on a mountain of ice covered with leaves and flowers. The "Fire Pheonix Beer (sic)" (火鳳牛柳) is a successful beef-and-pineapple stir-fry served inside a hollowed-out half pineapple.
As is probably apparent in that last sentence, the English on the menu is more color commentary than viable translation. Some items -- like the pretty-good XO sauce stir-fry prawn ball (served on a bed of water convulvus) -- are more or less what they sound like, but the menu really isn't navigable without some knowledge of Chinese. Nor are the waitresses hired for their English.
It should be said that, DS, despite its thematically seamy underbelly, is family safe (the one exception is the Saturday night "showgirl" performance). The nurses outfits are not tailored to be especially kinky, and as far as I can tell the curtained-off "intensive care unit" is nothing more than a place where large groups can sit together.
In 2020, a labor attache from the Philippines in Taipei sent a letter to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs demanding that a Filipina worker accused of “cyber-libel” against then-president Rodrigo Duterte be deported. A press release from the Philippines office from the attache accused the woman of “using several social media accounts” to “discredit and malign the President and destabilize the government.” The attache also claimed that the woman had broken Taiwan’s laws. The government responded that she had broken no laws, and that all foreign workers were treated the same as Taiwan citizens and that “their rights are protected,
A white horse stark against a black beach. A family pushes a car through floodwaters in Chiayi County. People play on a beach in Pingtung County, as a nuclear power plant looms in the background. These are just some of the powerful images on display as part of Shen Chao-liang’s (沈昭良) Drifting (Overture) exhibition, currently on display at AKI Gallery in Taipei. For the first time in Shen’s decorated career, his photography seeks to speak to broader, multi-layered issues within the fabric of Taiwanese society. The photographs look towards history, national identity, ecological changes and more to create a collection of images
The recent decline in average room rates is undoubtedly bad news for Taiwan’s hoteliers and homestay operators, but this downturn shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. According to statistics published by the Tourism Administration (TA) on March 3, the average cost of a one-night stay in a hotel last year was NT$2,960, down 1.17 percent compared to 2023. (At more than three quarters of Taiwan’s hotels, the average room rate is even lower, because high-end properties charging NT$10,000-plus skew the data.) Homestay guests paid an average of NT$2,405, a 4.15-percent drop year on year. The countrywide hotel occupancy rate fell from
March 16 to March 22 In just a year, Liu Ching-hsiang (劉清香) went from Taiwanese opera performer to arguably Taiwan’s first pop superstar, pumping out hits that captivated the Japanese colony under the moniker Chun-chun (純純). Last week’s Taiwan in Time explored how the Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) theme song for the Chinese silent movie The Peach Girl (桃花泣血記) unexpectedly became the first smash hit after the film’s Taipei premiere in March 1932, in part due to aggressive promotion on the streets. Seeing an opportunity, Columbia Records’ (affiliated with the US entity) Taiwan director Shojiro Kashino asked Liu, who had