Precision is required when meeting friends for a meal at Mei Wei Eatery. There are four restaurants operating under the same name in different parts of the capital. Each claims kinship with the original establishment on Shaoxing South Street (紹興南街) that had served Jiangzhe cuisine (江浙菜) for over three decades before being torn down several years ago.
A quick search on the Internet finds myriad comments and fierce debate over which Mei Wei Eatery is the most authentic. But as most foodie bloggers agree, the offshoot run by the eldest son of the original’s proprietor on Jinshan South Road (金山南路) doesn’t deviate from its precursor’s fare, and that was the one my dining companions and I visited on Sunday of last week.
Like its forbearer, this eatery is noted for its fish hot pot casserole (砂鍋魚頭, NT$750) and lion’s head meatballs (獅子頭), which can be ordered in a casserole (NT$750), a pot dish (NT$300) or individually (NT$130 each).
For the main course, we tried the fish casserole with two lion’s heads and were startled when the waitress delivered the dish. The meatballs were almost as big as a grown man’s fist. A giant chub fish head, deep-fried then simmered, was buried underneath layers of tofu, ham, Chinese cabbage, mushrooms and mung bean noodles (粉絲).
More than enough for a party of four, the casserole won unanimous approval. The cabbage, marinated with vinegar and pepper, delivered a sour and spicy tang that gave life to what could have been an overly heavy dish. Usually super-sensitive to the taste of seafood, I gladly found no fishiness in the pot.
The signature lion’s head also lived up to its reputation as ubertender.
Other strongly flavored dishes, which go well with cold Taiwan beer, include dry-fried green beans (乾扁四季豆, NT$160) and garlic squid (香蒜中卷, NT$260), which is deep-fried, then stir-fried with garlic and spices. For a milder option, there’s shredded pork with lapi (肉絲拉皮, NT$120), which is a popular summer dish made from a mixture of wasabe and sesame paste and lapi, or mung bean flour noodles.
In keeping with its recipes, which adhere to traditional cooking techniques, the restaurant is a plain, family-style affair; while not for aesthetes, Mei Wei Eatery is a reasonable place to eat in the city if a sitting among middle-aged men playing traditional drinking games doesn’t grate.
The other three Mei Wei eateries are run by the restaurant founder’s daughter, former chef and neighbor.
Taiwanese chip-making giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) plans to invest a whopping US$100 billion in the US, after US President Donald Trump threatened to slap tariffs on overseas-made chips. TSMC is the world’s biggest maker of the critical technology that has become the lifeblood of the global economy. This week’s announcement takes the total amount TSMC has pledged to invest in the US to US$165 billion, which the company says is the “largest single foreign direct investment in US history.” It follows Trump’s accusations that Taiwan stole the US chip industry and his threats to impose tariffs of up to 100 percent
From censoring “poisonous books” to banning “poisonous languages,” the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) tried hard to stamp out anything that might conflict with its agenda during its almost 40 years of martial law. To mark 228 Peace Memorial Day, which commemorates the anti-government uprising in 1947, which was violently suppressed, I visited two exhibitions detailing censorship in Taiwan: “Silenced Pages” (禁書時代) at the National 228 Memorial Museum and “Mandarin Monopoly?!” (請說國語) at the National Human Rights Museum. In both cases, the authorities framed their targets as “evils that would threaten social mores, national stability and their anti-communist cause, justifying their actions
In the run-up to World War II, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, began to fear that Hitler would launch a war Germany could not win. Deeply disappointed by the sell-out of the Munich Agreement in 1938, Canaris conducted several clandestine operations that were aimed at getting the UK to wake up, invest in defense and actively support the nations Hitler planned to invade. For example, the “Dutch war scare” of January 1939 saw fake intelligence leaked to the British that suggested that Germany was planning to invade the Netherlands in February and acquire airfields
The launch of DeepSeek-R1 AI by Hangzhou-based High-Flyer and subsequent impact reveals a lot about the state of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) today, both good and bad. It touches on the state of Chinese technology, innovation, intellectual property theft, sanctions busting smuggling, propaganda, geopolitics and as with everything in China, the power politics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). PLEASING XI JINPING DeepSeek’s creation is almost certainly no accident. In 2015 CCP Secretary General Xi Jinping (習近平) launched his Made in China 2025 program intended to move China away from low-end manufacturing into an innovative technological powerhouse, with Artificial Intelligence
RSS