When it comes to choosing a Chinese restaurant, the common opinion is that the longer the history, the better the quality. Not the case with the relatively young Ji Yuan. Since its inception in 2005, the restaurant has built up a broad clientele ranging from gourmands to local politicians to neighborhood families.
Service is efficient and the well-kept interior is warmly lit and embellished with red lanterns and Chinese brush paintings.
The menu of Jiangzhe cuisine (江浙菜) is extensive, but what makes Ji Yuan special is the unassuming vegetable called shepherd’s purse, or jicai
(薺菜), which is used as the key ingredient in the establishment’s feature dishes and is hardly found anywhere else in the city.
Jicai is commonly used as food in Shanghai and neighboring areas. The plant’s healing qualities have long been touted in China, Japan and Korea.
Grown in cold climates, jicai has a short harvest season during the springtime. To ensure a year-round supply of the vegetable, proprietor Cheng Wan-hua (程萬華) works with local farmers who grow the plant at high altitudes and makes his stock by first boiling the greens before preserving them in a freezer.
Jicai novices can’t go wrong with the restaurant’s Ji Yuan tofu (薺元招牌豆腐, NT$200). The vegetables deliver a distinct grassy tang, while the scallops lend the pot a fresh, oceanic aroma. It’s a simple dish that packs a burst of flavors, one this reviewer wonders if she will ever tire of.
The jicai pork dumplings
(薺菜上肉水餃, NT$100 for 10) are a luscious mix of succulent pork and vegetables. Other popular choices include jicai fried with rice cake (薺肉炒糕, NT$150) and jicai with bamboo shoots (薺菜燴筍, NT$200), a savory must-try for vegetarians.
Baby peas with chicken slices (豆米雞絲, NT$350) are a signature Jiangzhe dish. Using clear chicken broth to add a light, sweet taste, Ji Yuan’s version is almost on par with that of the famed Hsiu Lan
(秀蘭小館) restaurant.
Another signature plate is the san cha yueh (招牌三叉月, NT$350) or braised beef tendon. The protein-rich collagen has a velvety, almost fat-like texture and is paired with a sweet brown sauce condensed from cooking wine, sugar and soy sauce.
One should never start a meal at Ji Yuan without sampling its pen tou dishes (盆頭菜), or appetizers in Jiangzhe cuisine. Highlights include green chili stuffed with meat (青椒鑲肉), osmanthus-flavored duck tongue (桂花鴨舌) and the highly recommended braised crucian carp with scallion (蔥燒鯽魚). The restaurant serves more than a dozen pen tou dishes a day priced between NT$60 to NT$180.
It is barely 10am and the queue outside Onigiri Bongo already stretches around the block. Some of the 30 or so early-bird diners sit on stools, sipping green tea and poring over laminated menus. Further back it is standing-room only. “It’s always like this,” says Yumiko Ukon, who has run this modest rice ball shop and restaurant in the Otsuka neighbourhood of Tokyo for almost half a century. “But we never run out of rice,” she adds, seated in her office near a wall clock in the shape of a rice ball with a bite taken out. Bongo, opened in 1960 by
Common sense is not that common: a recent study from the University of Pennsylvania concludes the concept is “somewhat illusory.” Researchers collected statements from various sources that had been described as “common sense” and put them to test subjects. The mixed bag of results suggested there was “little evidence that more than a small fraction of beliefs is common to more than a small fraction of people.” It’s no surprise that there are few universally shared notions of what stands to reason. People took a horse worming drug to cure COVID! They think low-traffic neighborhoods are a communist plot and call
Over the years, whole libraries of pro-People’s Republic of China (PRC) texts have been issued by commentators on “the Taiwan problem,” or the PRC’s desire to annex Taiwan. These documents have a number of features in common. They isolate Taiwan from other areas and issues of PRC expansion. They blame Taiwan’s rhetoric or behavior for PRC actions, particularly pro-Taiwan leadership and behavior. They present the brutal authoritarian state across the Taiwan Strait as conciliatory and rational. Even their historical frames are PRC propaganda. All of this, and more, colors the latest “analysis” and recommendations from the International Crisis Group, “The Widening
Sept. 30 to Oct. 6 Chang Hsing-hsien (張星賢) had reached a breaking point after a lifetime of discrimination under Japanese rule. The talented track athlete had just been turned down for Team Japan to compete at the 1930 Far Eastern Championship Games despite a stellar performance at the tryouts. Instead, he found himself working long hours at Taiwan’s Railway Department for less pay than the Japanese employees, leaving him with little time and money to train. “My fighting spirit finally exploded,” Chang writes in his memoir, My Life in Sports (我的體育生活). “I vowed then to defeat all the Japanese in Taiwan
RSS