The Cherry Field Restaurant, though established by an immigrant from Taipei, has become one of Hualien’s showcase dining establishments. Health is front and center at Cherry Field, as owner Chen Ying-mei (陳櫻美) created the restaurant after coming to Hualien to recover from surgery for thyroid cancer. Friends from around the county, including Hakka, Hoklo and Aboriginal people, told her about many different folk remedies making use of Hualien’s vast selection of flora, much of it ignored by mainstream agriculture. She has included this experience in the creation of Cherry Field, a hot pot restaurant whose main feature is its buffet of five kinds of foraged wild greens that not only provide a unique flavor, but also all kinds of healthful benefits (including reduced cancer risk).
Personally I am always slightly dubious about restaurants that put health before flavor, as their claims for various therapeutic effects seem to be little more than an excuse for dishes lacking either character or balance. I was therefore rather skeptical about Cherry Field, but the buffet of vibrant-looking greens on the sideboard looked remarkably appealing. Staff encourage diners to use a mixture of all five available greens, which are selected from a range of 16, depending on availability. I had not heard of many of these plants, and the selection of nine herbal broths into which these greens were to be immersed was equally unfamiliar, though I did recognize aged radish and ginseng. The broths are all light, and need the wild greens to give them complexity. It is further enriched by meat, fish and other mainstream vegetables. A healthy hot pot (養生火鍋) with meat is NT$390 a head, featuring unlimited access to wild greens, chicken, pork and fish. A vegetarian version with a good selection of mushrooms to replace the meat is NT$300.
If the mix of wild greens is simply too medicinal in flavor (and it has to be admitted, these greens mostly fall into the category of bitter herbs, which accounts for their lack of popularity in the regular vegetable market, and is also a reason why they can grow successfully without the aid of pesticides), Cherry Field offers a wide selection of innovative and mainstream hot pots from heavily marbled “snow flake” prime beef hot pot (霜降牛肉鍋, NT$390 a head) to pumpkin hot pot (南瓜鍋, NT$250 a head). While there are plenty of vegetarian options available, meat eaters are catered to with a plentiful selection of choice and prime cuts.
Photo: Ian Bartholomew, Taipei Times
Cherry Field is primarily a hot pot restaurant and is ideally suited for tables of four and above. That said, the establishment also offers a selection of individual sets and a la carte dishes, many of them vegetarian. Quality is well above average and its pork trotter with dry pickled Chinese mustard (陳梅弄豬手, NT$200) and mountain yam with monkey head mushrooms (山藥猴頭菇, NT$200) are highly recommended.
Although the setting at Cherry Field is casual, considerable care is taken over presentation, and a high point of a hot pot meal is the immersion of a lotus flower into the pot at the beginning of the meal. Inevitably, health benefits are attributed to the flower, but the effect is also quite beautiful, and gives the meal a lovely sense of theater. The big cavernous interior of the restaurant can be a bit intimidating for couples, but the space has been well divided to provide a degree of intimacy for smaller tables.
Service is efficient and staff are helpful in instructing diners in the best way of navigating the complex menu. The selection of food is wide enough that healthy eaters and gourmands can all find some degree of satisfaction, and for those who find something that really flips their switch, many of the condiments used in the preparation of food at Cherry Field (most made by the restaurant), are also available to take home. It goes without saying that Cherry Field’s food ticks all the health boxes from high fiber, organic, low salt and of course no MSG.
Photo: Ian Bartholomew, Taipei Times
In 2020, a labor attache from the Philippines in Taipei sent a letter to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs demanding that a Filipina worker accused of “cyber-libel” against then-president Rodrigo Duterte be deported. A press release from the Philippines office from the attache accused the woman of “using several social media accounts” to “discredit and malign the President and destabilize the government.” The attache also claimed that the woman had broken Taiwan’s laws. The government responded that she had broken no laws, and that all foreign workers were treated the same as Taiwan citizens and that “their rights are protected,
A white horse stark against a black beach. A family pushes a car through floodwaters in Chiayi County. People play on a beach in Pingtung County, as a nuclear power plant looms in the background. These are just some of the powerful images on display as part of Shen Chao-liang’s (沈昭良) Drifting (Overture) exhibition, currently on display at AKI Gallery in Taipei. For the first time in Shen’s decorated career, his photography seeks to speak to broader, multi-layered issues within the fabric of Taiwanese society. The photographs look towards history, national identity, ecological changes and more to create a collection of images
March 16 to March 22 In just a year, Liu Ching-hsiang (劉清香) went from Taiwanese opera performer to arguably Taiwan’s first pop superstar, pumping out hits that captivated the Japanese colony under the moniker Chun-chun (純純). Last week’s Taiwan in Time explored how the Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) theme song for the Chinese silent movie The Peach Girl (桃花泣血記) unexpectedly became the first smash hit after the film’s Taipei premiere in March 1932, in part due to aggressive promotion on the streets. Seeing an opportunity, Columbia Records’ (affiliated with the US entity) Taiwan director Shojiro Kashino asked Liu, who had
The recent decline in average room rates is undoubtedly bad news for Taiwan’s hoteliers and homestay operators, but this downturn shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. According to statistics published by the Tourism Administration (TA) on March 3, the average cost of a one-night stay in a hotel last year was NT$2,960, down 1.17 percent compared to 2023. (At more than three quarters of Taiwan’s hotels, the average room rate is even lower, because high-end properties charging NT$10,000-plus skew the data.) Homestay guests paid an average of NT$2,405, a 4.15-percent drop year on year. The countrywide hotel occupancy rate fell from