I'm sitting at a long, low Japanese-style table surrounded by immaculate white cats shorn like poodles. The owner of 33 Rooms -- an extremely loud and eccentrically friendly late-middle-aged Taiwanese woman who peppers her Mandarin with Japanese -- has just stuck her cheek in my face. I'm running through homophones for qin in my head in case I misunderstood what she just said.
"Um, she wants a kiss," someone translates.
Once the deed is done, laobanniang -- who gives her name alternately as Chen Min-ching, Olive ("like Popeye's girl-friend"), and Ringleader Chen (陳老大), and whom everyone simply calls laobanniang -- traipses off into the other room. A moment later a group of people yells in unison, "May you have youth and beauty!"
PHOTO: CHRIS PECHSTEDT, TAIPEI TIMES
"Xie xie!" yells laobanniang.
This, it seems, is a pretty standard evening at 33 Rooms. Then Chen storms around the otherwise relaxing polished-wood interior, cussing out the staff and fraternizing with the customers. If you go (and if you don't mind dropping a big wad of cash), go prepared.
"People come for me, not for the food," she jokes in between kissing my hand and trying to set me up with another patron.
The food is excellent. Like everything else about 33 Rooms, it is a part of the owner's cult of personality.
There is no menu. When your group enters, you'll say how much you're willing to cough up, and whether there's anything you don't eat, and Olive will take care of the rest (read: make whatever she feels like). Typically, it starts off at NT$1,000 a head and goes up in increments of NT$500, but smaller budgets are accommodated.
The restaurant serves all sorts of Japanese food, especially beef, sashimi and other seafood, like chunks of a 50kg snow crab. There may be hotpot as well.
The results of 22 years of constantly changing the menu are apparent in the dishes, which are smallish but exquisite. The smallness isn't bad, either.
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
RSS