"Nouveau Taiwanese cuisine" is a label that was going to stick sometime. Now that it has you can sample traditional and reinvented Hakka dishes by prize-winning chef Robin Lin (林祺豐) at the Shang Palace in the Far Eastern Plaza Hotel (台北遠東國際大飯店). The former mechanical engineering and Chinese cuisine graduate combines attention to detail and a love of food and country.
The result is a piquant and earthy style of cooking that uses local ingredients, such as clams, salty pork, Chinese cabbage, preserved turnip, intestines and fruits of the sea. Lin uses these staple foods to develop "new Taiwanese" recipes based on old formulas.
The Hakka, or "guest people," were originally from northern China, around 1,700 years ago, but settled in the south and then moved outward in a series of diasporas. Most Taiwanese Hakka settled in hilly or remote areas and typically were poor and dependant on farming. As a result their food was often preserved with salt or by pickling, in order to make the most of their seasonal harvests. It was also occasionally oily as this provided much-needed energy.
PHOTO: JULES QUARTLY, TAIPEI TIMES
This was evident in dishes such as the salty pork with preserved turnip and the spicy, salted deep-fried bomb fish. Like spice in an Indian curry or the seasoning originally used by French chefs to disguise indifferent ingredients, Taiwanese fare has evolved its own set of flavors. Preserved been curd sauce is a key element in many of the dishes and has a strong taste that would have originally given bland food some interest.
"Hakka food is generally considered to be common. Here we are making it more cultured and sophisticated so that diners can appreciate the real Hakka spirit. It is food that was originally for poor people but actually it is now considered to be good for the health and natural," Lin said.
An example of this was the clam with fried rice, wrapped with cabbage that came garnished with seaweed. The gently seasoned seaweed and clams went together perfectly and Lin explained choosing elements that complemented each other was a signature of his dishes.
Lin, who won a Hakka cuisine championship in 2005, is head chef at the renowned Hwataoyao (華陶窯) restaurant, botanical garden and ceramic studio in Miaoli County (苗栗縣). For this weeklong promotion at the Far Eastern, Lin will assist the hotel's chefs in providing nouveau Taiwanese cuisine, for the first time.
Ajay Verma, a consultant gastroenterologist at Kettering general hospital in Northamptonshire, says our gut is a “complex machine.” “It is constantly providing us with the nutrition we need, initially to grow and develop, and then for us to survive, thrive and repair from injury and illness.” How can we keep it functioning well? Put simply: “Make sure what you put into it is balanced, and that you clear out its waste products adequately,” Verma says. “In a general gastroenterology clinic, the most common conditions we see are irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), gastroesophageal reflux disease, inflammatory bowel disease and constipation,” says Nisha
The arithmetic is straightforward and uncomfortable. By the end of 2025, Taiwan had committed itself to a 50-30-20 electricity mix — half natural gas, 30 per cent coal, 20 per cent renewables. The Ministry of Economic Affairs’s (MOEA) own monthly energy reports tell a different story. Natural gas reached 47.8 per cent of generation last year. Coal stood at 35.4 per cent, comfortably above its target ceiling. Renewables came in at 13.1 per cent, well short of the 20 per cent Taipei had pledged a decade earlier. Installed renewable capacity reached roughly half of the 12 gigawatts (GW) the government
Last week US President Donald Trump was asked by a reporter whether he would speak on the phone to the President of Taiwan. “l’ll speak to him. I speak to everybody. We have that situation very well in hand,” Trump said. This marked the second time in a couple of weeks he had said he would talk to the President of Taiwan. In 2016 he famously took a call from then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), when he was president-elect. Despite warnings that the apocalypse was nigh because of a phone call, the world quickly forgot about the conversation between two democratically-elected presidents.
Taiwan’s drone exports are taking off, fuelled by the war in Ukraine, as Taiwanese companies seek a stake in the fast-growing global market for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). Low-cost drones used for reconnaissance and strikes are in high demand as governments around the world boost defense spending in the face of intensifying conflicts. A relative new player in the increasingly competitive industry, Taiwan’s pitch is to be an “Asian hub” for the production of UAVs and components free of Chinese materials, or “non-red.” That means its UAVs can be up to three times more expensive than their Chinese competitors, like the world’s biggest
RSS