What it’s like to dine out with celebrities on delectable, rich Michelin-starred food – gout be damned. Publication last year of the first Taipei Michelin Guide launched Taipei into the rarefied ranks of cities like San Francisco, New York, and Shanghai that can boast their own Michelin guides. Of the total of 20 restaurants in…
I spent nearly 20 years of my career in the news business. Sometimes people ask me: What was your most popular story? Which one attracted the most attention? My answer is a bit embarrassing, though it probably shouldn’t be. As a foreign correspondent, I got to cover a lot of big breaking news — presidential…
Food waste carries a heavy social, environmental, and financial cost, but with the right technology, it can become a stable, low-cost, high-return source of electricity. Taiwan generates an estimated 16.5 million tons of food waste a year. That’s enough to fill 182 Olympic-size swimming pools every day all year, year-in and year-out. For most people,…
Cacai Cacao, Vicky Lin’s bean-to-bar chocolate company is a home business in every sense. The inspiration for the business came during a 2015 visit to her husband Mark’s family home in the Philippines, a trip that gave her the chance to see several cacao farms that make their own chocolate for turning into finished chocolate…
Justin Dunkle didn’t intend to follow in the footsteps of his father, Joseph Dunkle, a former military police officer from New York who founded Aunt Stella’s Cookies and Cakes in Japan in 1983. The younger Dunkle, raised in Japan and educated in Canada and Japan, instead originally chose a career in investment banking. The fallout…
Two experts note how improved industry-regulator communications helped in the U.S. Food safety issues have continued to plague Taiwan, despite comprehensive efforts by the regulatory agencies. At the same time, the food industry complains that many of the regulations and practices put into place to ensure that Taiwan’s food is safe and free of both…
Not long after coming to Taiwan to study Chinese, Brett Aaron started to dabble in business – opening the market here for Snapple beverages – as a way to help hone his language skills. Now, some three decades later, he is still based in Taipei, and the company he founded in 1994, BABI International Corp.,…
Despite Taiwan’s Austronesian past and unique food culture, it is surprising that visitors to Taipei cannot sample the country’s earliest cuisine in style. Taiwan’s Indigenous people have a long and proud tradition of essentially slow-cooked food that emphasizes seasonal and organic ingredients – quite in line with the foodie movement currently in vogue. But you…
Childhood: Consequence-Free Dining at the Night Market Will was on assignment in Taiwan, one of a group of bloggers, YouTubers, and other influencers invited by the Tourism Bureau to produce millennial-friendly content promoting Taiwan on the internet. It was his first day in town, so I figured the night market was a good place to…
More and more restaurants have been opening as increasing numbers of Taiwanese diners have come to appreciate Indian cooking. When Daniel Hsiung first arrived in Taiwan over 22 years ago, only a few Indian restaurants, including the venerable Tandoor Indian Restaurant, founded in 1989, could be found on the island. The overseas Chinese from Kolkata…
