Retail property prices along Taipei’s Yong Kang Street, a food strip recommended by the New York Times in 2008, may fall after Ice Monster (冰館), a stall known for its mango shaved ice desert, closed, said Sinyi Realty Co (信義房屋), the nation’s biggest real-estate brokerage.
Taipei-based Next Magazine reported last month that the owners of Ice Monster had closed the store, which the New York Times included in a list of 13 places to visit in the city if you had 36 hours. The owner of Ice Monster, Frank Lo (羅同邑), didn’t reply to e-mailed queries and his number wasn’t listed.
“It is a landmark of the food street, so prices are bound to fall after the closure,” Stanley Su (蘇啟榮), a Taipei-based senior researcher at Sinyi, said by telephone.
He declined to say how much he thought prices would drop.
Retail space on the street, which is as long as about 10 to 15 New York City blocks, is worth about NT$1.5 million (US$47,000) to NT$2 million per ping (3.3m²), or US$1,700 per square foot, Su said. This is on par with other “reputable” streets in Taipei, he said.
“Ice Monster’s closure has symbolic significance to the street,” said Guan Xing-ing, who manages NT$300 million for Fubon Global Reit Fund at Fubon Securities Investment Trust Co (富邦投信). “There are two landmarks on the street: Ice Monster and Din Tai Fung (鼎泰豐). The shutting down of Ice Monster will definitely reduce the crowd and then subsequently lower property prices in the area.”
Sales have dropped by 30 percent at the female accessory store next to Ice Monster, said Liu Hsiu-min, 25, a store assistant. Karen Li, 46, a shop helper at a footwear store diagonally across from the former desert shop, said the street was not as busy as before.
“The crowd has gone down by half,” said Li, who has been working in the shop for 10 years. “There are hardly any tourists now.”
Ding Lirong, 29, a Singaporean housewife who visits Taiwan at least once a year, said she used to “make it a point” to visit Yong Kang Street for Ice Monster’s deserts. Now, there’s “no such compulsion after the Ice Monster died.”
Ice Monster was just one of the many unique features of the street, said Wayne Liu(劉喜臨), a spokesman for the Tourism Bureau in Taipei.
“There are also other great eating places including Din Tai Fung; I won’t be too worried,” Liu said by telephone.
Din Tai Fung, voted by the New York Times as one of the top 10 restaurants in the world, sells steamed dumplings around Asia, including China, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. The branch on Yong Kang Street is its flagship store.
Ice Monster started operations in 1995, its Web site says.
The store, which boasted a mustache-clad yellow cube as its mascot, sold deserts, including fresh fruit mix, mango and custard, fresh mango jelly ice, and mandarin orange with lemon sorbet.
PROTECTION: The investigation, which takes aim at exporters such as Canada, Germany and Brazil, came days after Trump unveiled tariff hikes on steel and aluminum products US President Donald Trump on Saturday ordered a probe into potential tariffs on lumber imports — a move threatening to stoke trade tensions — while also pushing for a domestic supply boost. Trump signed an executive order instructing US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick to begin an investigation “to determine the effects on the national security of imports of timber, lumber and their derivative products.” The study might result in new tariffs being imposed, which would pile on top of existing levies. The investigation takes aim at exporters like Canada, Germany and Brazil, with White House officials earlier accusing these economies of
Teleperformance SE, the largest call-center operator in the world, is rolling out an artificial intelligence (AI) system that softens English-speaking Indian workers’ accents in real time in a move the company claims would make them more understandable. The technology, called accent translation, coupled with background noise cancelation, is being deployed in call centers in India, where workers provide customer support to some of Teleperformance’s international clients. The company provides outsourced customer support and content moderation to global companies including Apple Inc, ByteDance Ltd’s (字節跳動) TikTok and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd. “When you have an Indian agent on the line, sometimes it’s hard
‘SACRED MOUNTAIN’: The chipmaker can form joint ventures abroad, except in China, but like other firms, it needs government approval for large investments Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) needs government permission for any overseas joint ventures (JVs), but there are no restrictions on making the most advanced chips overseas other than for China, Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) said yesterday. US media have said that TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker and a major supplier to companies such as Apple Inc and Nvidia Corp, has been in talks for a stake in Intel Corp. Neither company has confirmed the talks, but US President Donald Trump has accused Taiwan of taking away the US’ semiconductor business and said he wants the industry back
PROBE CONTINUES: Those accused falsely represented that the chips would not be transferred to a person other than the authorized end users, court papers said Singapore charged three men with fraud in a case local media have linked to the movement of Nvidia’s advanced chips from the city-state to Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) firm DeepSeek (深度求索). The US is investigating if DeepSeek, the Chinese company whose AI model’s performance rocked the tech world in January, has been using US chips that are not allowed to be shipped to China, Reuters reported earlier. The Singapore case is part of a broader police investigation of 22 individuals and companies suspected of false representation, amid concerns that organized AI chip smuggling to China has been tracked out of nations such
RSS