The man at the next table plunks down two BlackBerrys on top of a stack of reports. He has the typical businessperson’s habit of peppering his Mandarin with English words like “finance,” “report” and “amazing de (的) performance.”
At Paul, the newly opened restaurant and bakery at Renai Circle, tuning out of neighboring diners’ conversations is difficult as the lunch and dinner crowds are made up of businesspeople and the dinning setup follows the French cafe tradition of placing tables just centimeters apart.
The French bakery and restaurant opened a few months back to much media fanfare, partially because most of Paul’s recipes use ingredients — no melamine here — sourced from France.
The restaurant has a banquette running along three walls and one six-seat table in the center and is crammed with two-person tables that can be pushed apart or together. The walls are painted a soothing autumnal yellow, and the small antique-style wall lights, Vermeer-like paintings and heavy curtains lend the place a rustic atmosphere. Large wooden beams crisscross the ceiling and complete the country farmhouse feel.
In keeping with the decor, the limited menu of quiches (NT$395), sandwiches (NT$385), salads (NT$385) and crepes (NT$385) is country-style cooking inspired by France. A la carte items can be ordered for takeout at the bakery.
While all items on the restaurant’s menu are set meals, which include main course, soup of the day and choice of coffee, tea or soft drink, items from the bakery can be ordered separately for dessert.
I went with the vegetarian quiche.
The mushroom soup arrived steaming hot in a small bowl just moments after it was ordered. The broth was creamy and full-flavored with generous chunks of freshly chopped mushrooms and topped with a thin baguette crouton.
The quiche was served on a large plate accompanied by a fresh garden salad tossed with red wine vinaigrette and thickly cut slices of baked tomato and zucchini. Swathed in olive oil and sprinkled with herbs, this accompaniment contrasted nicely with the heaviness of the quiche.
The quiche, held together with a rich and flaky pastry crust, which crumbled into pieces under a little pressure from my fork while the body still managed to retain its shape — a sign that Paul takes its pastry seriously — contained chunks of eggplant, zucchini and tomato. Hints of pesto and Parmesan added a complexity to the vegetables.
The portions at Paul tend toward the large and I didn’t have enough room to sample the wide array of pastries and desserts from the bakery next door. That will have to wait for another visit, which will likely be in the near future.— NOAH BUCHAN
Towering high above Taiwan’s capital city at 508 meters, Taipei 101 dominates the skyline. The earthquake-proof skyscraper of steel and glass has captured the imagination of professional rock climber Alex Honnold for more than a decade. Tomorrow morning, he will climb it in his signature free solo style — without ropes or protective equipment. And Netflix will broadcast it — live. The event’s announcement has drawn both excitement and trepidation, as well as some concerns over the ethical implications of attempting such a high-risk endeavor on live broadcast. Many have questioned Honnold’s desire to continues his free-solo climbs now that he’s a
As Taiwan’s second most populous city, Taichung looms large in the electoral map. Taiwanese political commentators describe it — along with neighboring Changhua County — as Taiwan’s “swing states” (搖擺州), which is a curious direct borrowing from American election terminology. In the early post-Martial Law era, Taichung was referred to as a “desert of democracy” because while the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was winning elections in the north and south, Taichung remained staunchly loyal to the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). That changed over time, but in both Changhua and Taichung, the DPP still suffers from a “one-term curse,” with the
Lines between cop and criminal get murky in Joe Carnahan’s The Rip, a crime thriller set across one foggy Miami night, starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. Damon and Affleck, of course, are so closely associated with Boston — most recently they produced the 2024 heist movie The Instigators there — that a detour to South Florida puts them, a little awkwardly, in an entirely different movie landscape. This is Miami Vice territory or Elmore Leonard Land, not Southie or The Town. In The Rip, they play Miami narcotics officers who come upon a cartel stash house that Lt. Dane Dumars (Damon)
Today Taiwanese accept as legitimate government control of many aspects of land use. That legitimacy hides in plain sight the way the system of authoritarian land grabs that favored big firms in the developmentalist era has given way to a government land grab system that favors big developers in the modern democratic era. Articles 142 and 143 of the Republic of China (ROC) Constitution form the basis of that control. They incorporate the thinking of Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙) in considering the problems of land in China. Article 143 states: “All land within the territory of the Republic of China shall
RSS