Eat Together (饗. 食天堂) is a franchise buffet restaurant that brings together a reasonable number of foods commonly found in Taipei all on one floor. Japanese, Chinese, European and Taiwanese dishes were among those I spotted last weekend when I visited this minor miracle of human engineering. The meal is a little pricey, but judging by the crowd, clearly not a great deterrent.
At the Q Square location (京站店), located close to the Taipei Main Station, each of the 352 seats was occupied when we arrived, and there was an hour-long wait at the door. Reservations, especially on weekends, are strongly advised.
During the interlude, my companions and I admired the interior’s marble floors and clean lines, which open up into chambers of food: sushi bar, salad bar, meat carving station and multiple panels of cakes and hot dishes. Once inside, we found a secret warren stocked with fruits and a dessert fondue.
Photo: Enru Lin, Taipei Times
Put another way, this is a huge space. But the service is impeccable, in spite of the seemingly boundless ground to cover. Moments after finishing the food on my plate, the neighborhood busser was right there to take it away.
On the buffet circuit, I encountered more staff, all of them friendly and impressively vigilant. It only takes a moment to receive a plate of designer sushi, or to have a family-sized bowl of curry hotpot or clam soup fired up on a stove range right in front of you.
And I was surprised by the quality of Eat Together’s sirloins, which are cooked to order and laid out tenderly on a plate by a strapping lad with a spatula. These little ones are a main event — juicy and blessedly fatty — and pair well with the milk-soaked pineapple that is offered alongside.
Photo: Enru Lin, Taipei Times
On the serve-it-yourself range, many of the dishes are of a quality you would expect from a meal at a business restaurant. A frying station serves up tempura prawns that are fresh, long and luxuriously battered. The German roast pork knuckle has a nice hard crust that gives way to buttery tenderness, and the baby potatoes are sweet and creamy.
Another panel features creative dishes in a tiny cup, the ingredients of which look as though they were arranged with tweezers. Some, like the single scallop on miso wasabi sauce and greens, brightened with a triangle of red bell pepper, were tasty. Others were strange, like the bacon cake doused with mayonnaise and herbs. The texture took its cue from fresh rice cake, but had a powerful fleshy flavor that made it hard to chew.
Throughout the meal, it was not easy to hear over the industry of the open kitchens, or that of fellow diners rushing about. So dinner conversation could probably never get romantic, or even very friendly: You must lean in, and sometimes shout.
Photo: Enru Lin, Taipei Times
Meanwhile, waiters circulate slowly to collect the bill in advance — we met ours about 40 minutes into the meal. She was firm, almost heroically so, and like us had to raise her voice above the din. While she said nothing to prompt our leaving, at least one at my table felt hurried and overlooked the finer points of Eat Together’s baked desserts, which were mostly made from scratch and looked beautiful. I helped myself to a bowl of Meiji and Haagen-Dazs ice cream, which are available in counters by the fondue section. In the end, I left Eat Together satisfied with the quality of the fare and feeling full, but was just a little glad that the excitement was over.
Photo: Enru Lin, Taipei Times
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
“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
Institutions signalling a fresh beginning and new spirit often adopt new slogans, symbols and marketing materials, and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is no exception. Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), soon after taking office as KMT chair, released a new slogan that plays on the party’s acronym: “Kind Mindfulness Team.” The party recently released a graphic prominently featuring the red, white and blue of the flag with a Chinese slogan “establishing peace, blessings and fortune marching forth” (締造和平,幸福前行). One part of the graphic also features two hands in blue and white grasping olive branches in a stylized shape of Taiwan. Bonus points for
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