The Ever Green Vegetarian Restaurant (長春素食) offers hotel-quality dining that’s relatively inexpensive and guilt-free — that is, unless you overeat. The restaurant, located near the intersection of Xinsheng North Road (新生北路) and Changchun Road (長春路), has an excellent all-you-can-eat buffet with dinner priced at NT$560 per person.
It’s a good deal, considering the well-prepared food and the surroundings. The enormous dining room, which seats more than 400 people, falls between a hotel conference room and traditional wedding banquet hall in terms of decor. Diners sit on soft plush chairs, perfect for enjoying the buffet at a leisurely pace and then leaning back when you’re stuffed.
The restaurant calls its spread a “European-style buffet,” which refers to the presentation and open kitchen where chefs prepare made-to-order stir-fry dishes, noodle soups and hot pot.
Most of the food consists of vegetarian versions of standard Chinese and Japanese dishes, along with a fresh salad bar of organic vegetables. Like many Buddhist vegetarian restaurants, Ever Green doesn’t cook with onion or garlic, but there are plenty of flavors to be found.
One memorable dish on a recent visit was a Sichuan-style mushroom stir-fry, which had a nice smoky flavor from the hollowed-out red chili peppers. The buffet also offers a few comfort food indulgences — there was an unusual but deliciously rich deep-fried taro ball stuffed with a dollop of curry sauce (have more than one at your peril), and fried battered mushrooms meant to emulate the night market staple yansuji (鹽酥雞), or fried chicken with basil.
Ever Green embraces the idea that being a vegetarian doesn’t mean you can’t pretend to enjoy consuming meat. Diners will also find a chilled “sashimi” bar stocked with fake salmon, tuna and yellowtail made out of konjac (蒟蒻), a plant-based gelatin. The look and texture came surprisingly close: The fake salmon was even dyed with white fat lines and tasted pretty good, especially with a dab of wasabi. But it won’t have sashimi lovers giving up the real thing anytime soon.
With the exception of the curried fried rice, which was cold and bland, it was hard to find anything unlikable. All of the vegetables, whether stir-fried or from the salad bar, tasted fresh and crisp.
Finish off the meal with a slice of marble cheesecake or Black Forest cake — just several among a dizzying array of desserts — and choose from a selection of herbal teas and juices.
As far as buffets go, Ever Green is worth visiting with a large appetite and time to spare.
Taiwanese chip-making giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) plans to invest a whopping US$100 billion in the US, after US President Donald Trump threatened to slap tariffs on overseas-made chips. TSMC is the world’s biggest maker of the critical technology that has become the lifeblood of the global economy. This week’s announcement takes the total amount TSMC has pledged to invest in the US to US$165 billion, which the company says is the “largest single foreign direct investment in US history.” It follows Trump’s accusations that Taiwan stole the US chip industry and his threats to impose tariffs of up to 100 percent
From censoring “poisonous books” to banning “poisonous languages,” the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) tried hard to stamp out anything that might conflict with its agenda during its almost 40 years of martial law. To mark 228 Peace Memorial Day, which commemorates the anti-government uprising in 1947, which was violently suppressed, I visited two exhibitions detailing censorship in Taiwan: “Silenced Pages” (禁書時代) at the National 228 Memorial Museum and “Mandarin Monopoly?!” (請說國語) at the National Human Rights Museum. In both cases, the authorities framed their targets as “evils that would threaten social mores, national stability and their anti-communist cause, justifying their actions
In the run-up to World War II, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, began to fear that Hitler would launch a war Germany could not win. Deeply disappointed by the sell-out of the Munich Agreement in 1938, Canaris conducted several clandestine operations that were aimed at getting the UK to wake up, invest in defense and actively support the nations Hitler planned to invade. For example, the “Dutch war scare” of January 1939 saw fake intelligence leaked to the British that suggested that Germany was planning to invade the Netherlands in February and acquire airfields
The launch of DeepSeek-R1 AI by Hangzhou-based High-Flyer and subsequent impact reveals a lot about the state of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) today, both good and bad. It touches on the state of Chinese technology, innovation, intellectual property theft, sanctions busting smuggling, propaganda, geopolitics and as with everything in China, the power politics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). PLEASING XI JINPING DeepSeek’s creation is almost certainly no accident. In 2015 CCP Secretary General Xi Jinping (習近平) launched his Made in China 2025 program intended to move China away from low-end manufacturing into an innovative technological powerhouse, with Artificial Intelligence
RSS