Tucked away in a lane in Gongguan (公館) close to the intersection of Roosevelt Road and Xinsheng South Road, Yangon (仰光滇緬料理) serves up delicious Burmese-style food with Thai and Yunnan influences. Owner Tsun Dai-hua (寸待華) came to Taiwan more than 30 years ago to study Chinese and liked the country so much that after a stint slicing and dicing at restaurants in Japan, he returned to Taiwan and opened up his restaurant 18 years ago. His family, which hails from Yunnan, fled to Myanmar following the Chinese Civil War.
I’ve eaten at Yangon several times over the years and have never been disappointed by its fresh and spicy food, excellent service and warm interior of terra-cotta tiled floors and dark wood tables. But it’s the restaurant’s fusion of flavors and textures that make it stand out.
Take Yangon’s seafood salad (NT$280), for example, which is more Thai than Burmese, yet doesn’t suffer as a result. Ample portions of cuttlefish, clams and shrimp are mixed with a moderate amount of tomato, onion, cucumber and chopped basil. Served with a tangy homemade chili sauce, the seafood is prepared in such a way as to bring out its different textures — firm slices of the cuttlefish contrasting nicely with the soft shrimp and chewy clams.
Photo: Noah Buchan, Taipei Times
From firm and soft to moist and crunchy, one bite of the deep-fried chicken with spicy sauce (NT$250) and you’ll understand why it ranks as one of Yangon’s most popular dishes. Not too greasy nor too oily, the chicken breast was juicy on the inside, and crispy outside. Resting on a bed of sliced cabbage and drizzled with a spicy sauce made from cilantro, garlic, ginger, chili and lime, it disappeared from the plate very quickly.
Though it might not be the prettiest dish you’ve ever seen, the flavor of the stir-fried pork (NT$220, NT$230 for chicken, NT$250 for beef) with chili paste more than makes up for its lack of aesthetic appeal. The robust chili taste is tempered by slightly acidic tomato and sweet basil. On previous visits, I’ve tried the steamed lemon perch (NT$380), which was delightfully sour, and fried chicken in coconut cream (NT$230), which I found somewhat oily and rather tasteless — the only disappointing dish I’ve ever had at the restaurant.
Yangon has four lunch specials (NT$120), which include deep-fried chicken with spicy sauce, stir-fried beef in chili paste, fried pork with bamboo shoot and Yunnan-style stir-fried pork with homemade pickles. Lunch specials come with rice, two vegetable dishes, soup and dessert. And for those of you who want to try Tsun’s recipes at home, be sure to pick up a copy of Let’s Eat Burmese Cuisine (來吃滇緬菜), his cookbook published by Kingstone (膳書房).
Photo: Noah Buchan, Taipei Times
Photo: Noah Buchan, Taipei Times
Dec. 9 to Dec. 15 When architect Lee Chung-yao (李重耀) heard that the Xinbeitou Train Station was to be demolished in 1988 for the MRT’s Tamsui line, he immediately reached out to the owner of Taiwan Folk Village (台灣民俗村). Lee had been advising Shih Chin-shan (施金山) on his pet project, a 52-hectare theme park in Changhua County that aimed to showcase traditional Taiwanese architecture, crafts and culture. Shih had wanted to build all the structures from scratch, but Lee convinced him to acquire historic properties and move them to the park grounds. Although the Cultural
The Taipei Times reported last week that housing transactions fell 15.3 percent last month, to under 20,000 units. However, the market boomed for the first eight months of the year, and observers expect it to show growth for the year as a whole. The fall was due to Central Bank intervention. “The negative impact of credit controls grew evident for the third straight month,” said Sinyi Realty Inc (信義房屋) research manager Tseng Ching-ter (曾敬德), according to the report. Central Bank Governor Yang Chin-long (楊金龍) in October said that the Central Bank implemented selective credit controls in September to cool the housing
Bitcoin topped US$100,000 for the first time this week as a massive rally in the world’s most popular cryptocurrency, largely accelerated by the election of Donald Trump, rolls on. The cryptocurrency officially rose six figures Wednesday night, just hours after the president-elect said he intends to nominate cryptocurrency advocate Paul Atkins to be the next chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Bitcoin has soared since Trump won the US presidential election on Nov. 5. The asset climbed from US$69,374 on Election Day, hitting as high as US$103,713 Wednesday, according to CoinDesk. And the latest all-time high arrives just two years after
About half of working women reported feeling stressed “a lot of the day,” compared to about 4 in 10 men, according to a Gallup report published this week. The report suggests that competing demands of work and home comprise part of the problem: working women who are parents or guardians are more likely than men who are parents to say they have declined or delayed a promotion at work because of personal or family obligations, and mothers are more likely than fathers to “strongly agree” that they are the default responders for unexpected child care issues. And 17 percent of women overall
RSS