Hsia Chao-lin's restaurant is not a dump. It's just above one.
The bistro is built around a smoke stack at Taiwan's biggest garbage incinerator. So when the posh eatery opens on Jan. 1, diners will be able to nibble on steamed crab and sip shark's fin soup, while more than 1,800 tons of paper, plastic and other trash go up in flames 102 meters below.
"You're at an incinerator but you don't have any sense of that when you're here," said Hsia, a 25-year veteran of the restaurant business who has named the new establishment "Tsaihsinglou," or "Starcatcher."
The restaurant is believed to be the only eatery in the world built above the flue of a garbage incinerator, an effort by plant manager Eric Chu to put to rest outdated fears about garbage disposal.
Although a steady stream of garbage trucks rumble nearby, there's no stench outside the restaurant or in its marble waterfall-adorned lobby at the base of the smokestack.
Visitors ride up a shiny glass elevator to another lobby that opens to the plush donut-shaped dining area. The lobby area stays still while the dining area turns 360 degrees each hour.
The trucks and incinerator plant are visible at the base, but garbage can't be seen from the restaurant.
Instead, diners view rice and vegetable fields, the Tamsui River, nearby Taipei, and mountainous Yangmingshan National Park.
Consumers need to be reminded that garbage disposal is nothing to be ashamed of or feared, Chu said.
-- AP, TAIPEI
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