Afternoon Tea is perched on Sogo Zhongxiao’s second floor and overlooks Zhongxiao East Road — and the department store’s outdoor “It’s a Small World” clock, which is based on the popular Disneyland attraction and goes off with music and dancing dolls every hour. Fortunately, Afternoon Tea’s bay windows are soundproof and diners can enjoy their drinks and very sweet cakes and pastries in peace. The popular restaurant (we had to wait almost half an hour for seats on a Saturday afternoon) is as frilly as its fruit tarts, with rattan chairs, crystal chandeliers, flowers on each table and a giant mural of a cherry blossom filled garden.
I ordered an original apple pie (AT原創蘋果派, NT$150) and pot of hot caramel tea (焦糖, NT$120). Afternoon Tea’s version of apple pie is actually more like a layer cake, with slices of caramelized apples nestled in between syrup-soaked sponge cake and mounds of fluffy whipped cream. The confection sounds like it would be overwhelming sweet, but it is just right, with the whipped cream tempering the sweetness of the apples and cake. It paired very well with my pot of caramel tea, which is actually black tea with a hint of rich caramel aroma and not candy-like at all, even with sugar cubes and cream stirred in.
On a separate visit, my dining companion and I split a plate of spaghetti with tomato cream sauce, chicken and spinach (雞肉菠菜蕃茄奶油意大利麵, NT$210) from Afternoon Tea’s selection of pasta dishes. The savory chicken sausage was delicious, even though the price was a little high considering the rather dainty portion.
We selected our drinks, pineapple with honey jelly (黃金鳳梨薄菏伯爵冰, NT$150) and strawberry and raspberry julep tea (草莓覆盆莓伯爵茶凍, NT$160), because they were the most interesting looking selections on the refreshment menu. Both were so filled with jelly, fruit and cream, however, that they would have worked better as desserts instead of complements for our food. The tartness of each frozen pineapple chunk was lost in the honey-flavored jelly and juice; the strawberry and raspberry julep tea, which featured fresh fruit and berry syrup, was more refreshing, even though it had little in the way of actual tea.
If you are happy with your Afternoon Tea experience, you can take some of the restaurant’s atmosphere home with you by shopping in its relentlessly frou frou gift shop, Afternoon Tea Living. It is crammed with bone china tea sets, very flowery table linen, delicate glassware, Liberty-print bags, little silver spoons and other kitchen accoutrements, including handmade glass chopstick rests, decorated Pyrex measuring cups and a clever little plastic banana holder for people who are willing to spend NT$300 to avoid squished fruit.
May 11 to May 18 The original Taichung Railway Station was long thought to have been completely razed. Opening on May 15, 1905, the one-story wooden structure soon outgrew its purpose and was replaced in 1917 by a grandiose, Western-style station. During construction on the third-generation station in 2017, workers discovered the service pit for the original station’s locomotive depot. A year later, a small wooden building on site was determined by historians to be the first stationmaster’s office, built around 1908. With these findings, the Taichung Railway Station Cultural Park now boasts that it has
The latest Formosa poll released at the end of last month shows confidence in President William Lai (賴清德) plunged 8.1 percent, while satisfaction with the Lai administration fared worse with a drop of 8.5 percent. Those lacking confidence in Lai jumped by 6 percent and dissatisfaction in his administration spiked up 6.7 percent. Confidence in Lai is still strong at 48.6 percent, compared to 43 percent lacking confidence — but this is his worst result overall since he took office. For the first time, dissatisfaction with his administration surpassed satisfaction, 47.3 to 47.1 percent. Though statistically a tie, for most
Six weeks before I embarked on a research mission in Kyoto, I was sitting alone at a bar counter in Melbourne. Next to me, a woman was bragging loudly to a friend: She, too, was heading to Kyoto, I quickly discerned. Except her trip was in four months. And she’d just pulled an all-nighter booking restaurant reservations. As I snooped on the conversation, I broke out in a sweat, panicking because I’d yet to secure a single table. Then I remembered: Eating well in Japan is absolutely not something to lose sleep over. It’s true that the best-known institutions book up faster
In February of this year the Taipei Times reported on the visit of Lienchiang County Commissioner Wang Chung-ming (王忠銘) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and a delegation to a lantern festival in Fuzhou’s Mawei District in Fujian Province. “Today, Mawei and Matsu jointly marked the lantern festival,” Wang was quoted as saying, adding that both sides “being of one people,” is a cause for joy. Wang was passing around a common claim of officials of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the PRC’s allies and supporters in Taiwan — KMT and the Taiwan People’s Party — and elsewhere: Taiwan and
RSS