Voting for The Miele Guide 2010/2011, which lists Asia’s finest restaurants, opens on March 10 at www.mieleguide.com and closes May 19. Voters are required to register to ensure each ballot is unique and can cast a maximum of three votes for restaurants in their own country out of the 10 votes allotted.
The establishments in the guide were short-listed by restaurant critics across Asia. The final selection is based on the public vote, a jury of food and beverage professionals and incognito tastings by The Miele
Guide team.
Touted as Asia’s first independent and authoritative dining guide, the team says the guide strives to be the true and credible voice of the dining culture every year.
Tidbits dusted off our crystal ball, and we predict that L’Atelier de Joel Robuchon, a three-star Michelin restaurant chain, which opened on Nov. 5 at the Bellavita shopping center in Taipei City’s Xinyi District (5F, 90 Songren Rd, Taipei City (台北市松仁路90號5樓) tel: (02) 8729-2628), will top the bill and boost the country’s meager five entries in the last edition, and may make the Asia top 20 list.
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
The sprawling port city of Kaohsiung seldom wins plaudits for its beauty or architectural history. That said, like any other metropolis of its size, it does have a number of strange or striking buildings. This article describes a few such curiosities, all but one of which I stumbled across by accident. BOMBPROOF HANGARS Just north of Kaohsiung International Airport, hidden among houses and small apartment buildings that look as though they were built between 15 and 30 years ago, are two mysterious bunker-like structures that date from the airport’s establishment as a Japanese base during World War II. Each is just about