Gluttony and lavishness aren’t usually associated with a Buddhist vegetarian meal, but those were the first things on my mind upon entering Jen Dow Vegetarian Buffet Restaurant (人道素菜百匯餐廳), which offers all-you-can-eat meals priced at NT$660 for lunch and NT$770 for dinner.
Located in the Howard Garden Suites building on Changchun Road (長春路) in Taipei, Jen Dow displays the typical hallmarks of a pricey hotel buffet. Diners sit on plush chairs at tables covered with white tablecloths and mosey their way back and forth between several long rows of well-prepared Asian-style food kept warm on silver chafing dishes. There’s a fully stocked juice and cocktail bar, a fresh fruit and salad bar, a dessert table with dozens of cakes and sweets and a chocolate fondue fountain, several freezers full of Haagen-Dazs ice cream — and the list goes on.
The restaurant caters to “su” (素) vegetarians, who avoid garlic, onion, leek or any other strong-flavored foods that are said to overstimulate the body and mind.
Photo: David Chen, Taipei Times
At Jen Dow, this means the sauce on your pasta, prepared fresh upon request by a chef at the buffet, might lack the sweet and pungent bite that only garlic and onion can deliver. The same goes for anything you get at the vegetable stir-fry station, an open kitchen where another chef cooks whatever fresh greens are on hand. Still, I was impressed with what he did with the plate of kongxincai (空心菜), the long and stringy shimeiji mushrooms and bean sprouts that I handed him. The greens were done just right: They were cooked in a mild but flavorful broth and retained a nice crisp.
The buffet offers decent adaptations of standard dishes like sweet-and-sour pork, with the meat replaced by tofu, and Hakka-style stir-fried eggplant. As with many vegetarian restaurants, most dishes utilize mushrooms and tofu as the main ingredients.
On a recent visit, I took a liking to a vegetarian version of another Hakka dish, stir-fried flat rice noodles (客家板條), which was tasty enough to have seconds. I wasn’t as crazy about the Malaysian-style curry, which had a gingery bite meant to replace the chili. If you’re in the mood for Japanese, there’s always the “sashimi” bar, with the fake tuna and salmon made out of konjac (蒟蒻), a plant-based gelatin. It will never beat the real thing, but it’s worth a try if you’re feeling adventurous.
In general, the Asian-style dishes at Jen Dow are better than the Western ones. You will find nice little surprises, like blue cheese and fresh baguettes at the pasta bar, but the Hyatt it is not.
I tend to gravitate toward the dim sum section whenever I visit — Jen Dow does a better job on these dishes than a similar buffet, the Ever Green Vegetarian Restaurant (長春素食, see page 14 of the April 30, 2010, edition of the Taipei Times for a review). You can’t go wrong with the steamed rice noodle rolls (腸粉), the fried turnip cake (蘿蔔糕), and fried spring rolls, which I find just as appetizing as the versions with meat.
Strangely, Jen Dow serves alcohol, with a selection of wines and cocktails on offer at an extra charge. If you want to imbibe in the presence of the monks, nuns and devout Buddhists that make up a sizable part of Jen Dow’s regular clientele, martinis are NT$150, mojitos are NT$90 and a range of Glenmorangie single malts are available from NT$150 to NT$180 per glass.
Overall, Ever Green remains a better value option at NT$560 for dinner and NT$500 for lunch, as it has a wider variety and the quality of its food is just as good. But if the amenities are important to you, then Jen Dow has the edge — the dining room is tidier and feels more upscale, given its location inside of a hotel. And the thought of eight varieties of Haagen-Dazs ice cream at an all-you-can-eat buffet can be hard to resist.
Taiwan has next to no political engagement in Myanmar, either with the ruling military junta nor the dozens of armed groups who’ve in the last five years taken over around two-thirds of the nation’s territory in a sprawling, patchwork civil war. But early last month, the leader of one relatively minor Burmese revolutionary faction, General Nerdah Bomya, who is also an alleged war criminal, made a low key visit to Taipei, where he met with a member of President William Lai’s (賴清德) staff, a retired Taiwanese military official and several academics. “I feel like Taiwan is a good example of
March 2 to March 8 Gunfire rang out along the shore of the frontline island of Lieyu (烈嶼) on a foggy afternoon on March 7, 1987. By the time it was over, about 20 unarmed Vietnamese refugees — men, women, elderly and children — were dead. They were hastily buried, followed by decades of silence. Months later, opposition politicians and journalists tried to uncover what had happened, but conflicting accounts only deepened the confusion. One version suggested that government troops had mistakenly killed their own operatives attempting to return home from Vietnam. The military maintained that the
“M yeolgong jajangmyeon (anti-communism zhajiangmian, 滅共炸醬麵), let’s all shout together — myeolgong!” a chef at a Chinese restaurant in Dongtan, located about 35km south of Seoul, South Korea, calls out before serving a bowl of Korean-style zhajiangmian —black bean noodles. Diners repeat the phrase before tucking in. This political-themed restaurant, named Myeolgong Banjeom (滅共飯館, “anti-communism restaurant”), is operated by a single person and does not take reservations; therefore long queues form regularly outside, and most customers appear sympathetic to its political theme. Photos of conservative public figures hang on the walls, alongside political slogans and poems written in Chinese characters; South
Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) announced last week a city policy to get businesses to reduce working hours to seven hours per day for employees with children 12 and under at home. The city promised to subsidize 80 percent of the employees’ wage loss. Taipei can do this, since the Celestial Dragon Kingdom (天龍國), as it is sardonically known to the denizens of Taiwan’s less fortunate regions, has an outsize grip on the government budget. Like most subsidies, this will likely have little effect on Taiwan’s catastrophic birth rates, though it may be a relief to the shrinking number of
RSS