“A fresh look on traditional Taiwanese rechao,” reads the Facebook page of Drunken Monkey, a recently opened restaurant five minutes by foot from Guting MRT Station’s (古亭捷運站) Exit 2.
Rechao (熱炒, literally hot-fry) restaurants are a common sight across Taiwan, serving up smallish dishes of everything from deep-fried seafood, stir-fried beef and pork to vegetable and tofu dishes — all of which are typically washed down with copious Taiwan Beer. But perhaps more than anything else, rechao is about community, getting together with friends, family or colleagues and sharing several dishes and a few laughs.
Drunken Monkey’s “fresh” take on rechao is Cantonese fusion.
Photo: Noah Buchan, Taipei Times
Alex Holliday, Drunken Monkey’s talkative proprietor, learned to cook Cantonese-style food from his grandfather, who escaped the ravages of China’s Civil War and ended up in Vancouver, where he opened Capilano Heights Chinese Restaurant 37 years ago. Holliday first came to Taiwan in 2003 to learn Mandarin. He moved here in September of last year and opened the restaurant in November.
Drunken Monkey’s menu includes typical rechao fare — kungpao chicken (NT$100), fried clams with basil (NT$100), deep-fried oysters (NT$120) and deep-fried prawns with pineapple (NT$120) — as well as some “drunken munchies” — Western-style additions such as chicken nuggets (NT$100) and onion rings (NT$100).
I wanted to taste Holliday’s Cantonese favorites, and started off with the combat pork (NT$100), strips of pork dipped in batter, fried until crispy and topped with heaps of chopped garlic. Savory, crispy and garlicky, the robust combination went well with an order of slightly sweet fried cabbage (NT$80).
Photo: Noah Buchan, Taipei Times
The explosive green onion, tofu and beef (NT$100) is a dish also worth ordering, both because of its tasty combination of ingredients as well as its light seasoning. But the green onion and tofu (NT$100) is the standout dish of the items that I tried. Large chunks of lightly seared tofu are drowned in a robust Cantonese-style stew. I’ve tried this dish at other restaurants, many charging double the price for similar sized portions, and this version wins hands down. It went well with a large bottle of Taiwan Gold Label beer (NT$80) and complimentary bowl of white rice.
While many of Drunken Monkey’s dishes offer a new twist on Taiwanese culinary standards, the decor has an old-style and homey rechao feel to it: black-and-white pictures of Capilano Heights Chinese Restaurant, stools and unadorned tables in buttery yellow, walls scribbled with customer comments and framed pictures showing scenes from Chinese mythology. There is even a small table at the front reserved for bottles of whisky, kaoliang and bourbon, which customers can “keep” at the restaurant. But even the interior has some interesting additions: boxing gear (Holliday hung up his muay Thai gloves to open the restaurant) hangs off large posters of monkeys in all manner of martial arts display. A Canadian flag adorns another wall, its maple leaf replaced by a marijuana leaf.
Though Drunken Monkey is no-frills, its inexpensive and tasty fare makes it worth a visit. And if you are like me and want to have at extra few beers on the weekend, Holliday says he’ll stay open until the last “drunken monkey” staggers out of the restaurant.
By global standards, the traffic congestion that afflicts Taiwan’s urban areas isn’t horrific. But nor is it something the country can be proud of. According to TomTom, a Dutch developer of location and navigation technologies, last year Taiwan was the sixth most congested country in Asia. Of the 492 towns and cities included in its rankings last year, Taipei was the 74th most congested. Taoyuan ranked 105th, while Hsinchu County (121st), Taichung (142nd), Tainan (173rd), New Taipei City (227th), Kaohsiung (241st) and Keelung (302nd) also featured on the list. Four Japanese cities have slower traffic than Taipei. (Seoul, which has some
Michael slides a sequin glove over the pop star’s tarnished legacy, shrouding Michael Jackson’s complications with a conventional biopic that, if you cover your ears, sounds great. Antoine Fuqua’s movie is sanctioned by Jackson’s estate and its producers include the estate’s executors. So it is, by its nature, a narrow, authorized perspective on Jackson. The film ends before the flood of allegations of sexual abuse of children, or Jackson’s own acknowledgment of sleeping alongside kids. Jackson and his estate have long maintained his innocence. In his only criminal trial, in 2005, Jackson was acquitted. Michael doesn’t even subtly nod to these facts.
Writing of the finds at the ancient iron-working site of Shihsanhang (十 三行) in New Taipei City’s Bali District (八里), archaeologist Tsang Cheng-hwa (臧振華) of the Academia Sinica’s Institute of History and Philology observes: “One bronze bowl gilded with gold, together with copper coins and fragments of Tang and Song ceramics, were also found. These provide evidence for early contact between Taiwan aborigines and Chinese.” The Shihsanhang Web site from the Ministry of Culture says of the finds: “They were evidence that the residents of the area had a close trading relation with Chinese civilians, as the coins can be
The January 2028 presidential election is already stirring to life. In seven or eight months, the primary season will kick into high gear following this November’s local elections. By this point next year, we will likely know the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate and whether the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) will be fielding a candidate. Also around this time, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) will either have already completed their primary, or it will be heading into the final stretch. By next summer, the presidential race will be in high gear. The big question is who will be the KMT’s
RSS