If you think most Taipei urbanites are stuck in the rat race and would be too busy to stand in line for over 30 minutes to secure a pork chop for lunch, check out the tonkatsu eatery hidden behind the Cathay General Hospital on Renai Road. A beneficiary of the influence wielded by bloggers and online chat room gossipers, the restaurant's sets, consisting of a breaded, deep-fried pork cutlet served Japanese-style, are hot property.
Is the wait worthwhile?
Dinners can choose to fill up on the popular Japanese meal in two ways: traditional or innovative.
PHOTO: HO YI, TAIPEI TIMES
One option is pork chop served with daikon, or white radish, mash.
If simplicity is not your style, the restaurant does a range of pork cutlets stuffed with various fillings. For NT$310, patrons can make their own combinations of pork chop with two choices from over 10 options including cheese, kimchi, tuna salad, egg, crab meat and curry sauce.
Cheese tonkatsu seems to be the restaurant's tour de force. In one bite, the gooey cheese coats the chop's crispy layer and succelent meat creating a sumptuous trio of textures. The cheese and curry chop, on the other hand, tries too hard, and packs too much of a punch with a confusing array of flavors.
The kimchi option is sour, sweet, spicy and piquant, without one flavor dominating the dish. For those who want a feast for the eyes as well as one for the stomach, the laver and steamed eggs set and the plum sauce and crab option are must-tries.
Adding condiments to the meal is a treat in itself as diners are provided with pestles in which to grind white sesame seeds and other spices.
Fresh shredded cabbage, miso soup and high-quality rice come in unlimited supply with the sets.
As the establishment is pretty much full day and night, weekdays and weekends, the motto of the wait staff is to serve up the fare as quickly as possible with passable courtesy. Dishes are served at an admirable speed while wait staff politely ask permission to clean up empty plates from time to time. It is not an ideal venue for a lengthy tete-a-tete with an old lover. Don't hesitate to prevent the eager wait staff from taking away your half-finished food and be careful with the mustard dressing, it is fiery stuff and could have you wincing and blubbering through your entire meal.
For more than four decades, all students in Taiwan, up to the university level, were mandated to take “Sun Yat-sen Thought” (國父思想) classes. Based on the Republic of China founder’s Three Principles of the People political ideology, they also contained anti-communist sentiments and patriotic Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) propaganda. After the lifting of martial law in 1987, students began calling for more academic freedom and for schools to be free of government interference. On Sept. 19, 1990, representatives from eight departments at National Taiwan University (NTU) released a joint statement asking the Department of Education to make the course an
At the Brics summit in South Africa in August, Xi Jinping (習近平) made headlines when he failed to appear at a leaders’ meeting to deliver a scheduled speech. Another scene also did the rounds: a Chinese aide hurrying to catch up with Xi, only to be body slammed by security guards and held back, flailing, as the president cruised on through the closing doors, not bothered by the chaos behind him. The first incident prompted rampant speculation about Xi’s health, a political crisis or conspiracy. The second, mostly memes. But it perhaps served as a metaphor. Xi has had a rough few
A recent report by TaiwanPlus presented a widely believed factoid about solar photovoltaic (PV) power farms: “they take precious land away from agriculture.” Similarly, a Reuters piece from August last year contends that agricultural land in Taiwan is precious and that “there is little room for sprawling wind and solar farms, which take up significantly more space than conventional energy sources.” Both of Reuters’ claims are false. There is plenty of room in Taiwan for all the renewable energy systems we need. Our problem is not a lack of land, but Taiwan’s crazed land management policies and programs. An excellent
As Vladimir Nabokov revised his autobiography, Speak, Memory, he found himself in a strange psychological state. He had first written the book in English, published in 1951. A few years later, a New York publisher asked him to translate it back into Russian for the emigre community. The use of his mother tongue brought back a flood of new details from his childhood, which he converted into his adopted language for a final edition, published in 1966. “This re-Englishing of a Russian re-version of what had been an English re-telling of Russian memories in the first place, proved to be a
RSS