Taiwanese culinary culture
IS Tea 
A Contemporary teahouse 

Tea snacks at IS Tea. Clockwise from top left: New-Year cake, 'rolling donkeys"(sticky-rice dumplings rolled in bean-flour and chopped nuts), bean-vetch cake, and osmanthus-blossom cake.

WChinese tea has taken on a new life in Taiwan, and IS Tea is a teahouse that represents the art of contemporary Chinese tea. In addition to traditional Chinese teas like Jasmine, Oolong, Paochung, Tie Kuanyin and Pu'r, IS Tea also offers such drinks as cappuccino tea, "teatail," and green tea beer, all created by owner Huang Te-chang. 

Chicken cooked with oolong tea.

Huang picked up his tea addiction at university, when he started splashing out on top-grade tea regardless of the cost. The leaf tea market has been manic in the past few years, driven by the stock market boom, but the pressure on growers to service the expanded demand for their product has led to wide disparities in tea quality and sharply fluctuating prices. 

IS Tea uses leaf tea for a variety of food and drinks. The teahouse is like an oasis of calm amid its busy surroundings.

Huang ensures that all the tea sold in his teahouse is "two-five tea"(picked between two and five in the afternoon, considered the proper time for gathering the leaves), and has been processed in the traditional way, through fermenting to roasting and kneading. At IS Tea, even an unremarkable glass of Taiwanese iced black tea--mellow and fragrant to the taste--is brewed from leaves with a vintage of at least ten years. 

The home-made petits fours at IS Tea include a melt-in-the-mouth milk-vetch cake, a refreshing and sweet osmanthus-blossom cake, and Huang's newly created green-tea cake. All go superbly with tea. Huang is also exploiting alternative possibilities for tea, using leaf tea, tea soup and tea powder to make various adaptations of classic dishes, such as black-tea skewered meat, chicken in oolong, and pu'er Dongpo pork. Whether eaten, quaffed or sniffed, everything on the menu at IS Tea is simply delicious.
 

No 15, Alley 6, Lane 113, Minsheng E. Rd. Sec. 3, Taipei (behind the Sherwood Hotel) Tel: 02-2715-1169

Wangji Fucheng Zongzi
 -A popular Tainan food storms Taipei 

The zongzi at Wangji Fucheng are boiled in the southern-Taiwan style.

Boiled meat zongzi: parcels of sticky rice filled with mushy pork.

With the election to the presidency of the DPP's Chen Shui-bian, who hails from a simple rural background in southern Taiwan, that ole southern soulfood--dishes such as Taiwanese rice pudding and milkfish-ball soup--was promoted to form part of the menu for the presidential inauguration banquet. Thus was Taipei graced with the delights of the "little eats,"(or snackfood) of Tainan.

The southern-Taiwanese zongzi at Wangji Fucheng had already won the hearts and mouths of the people of Taipei, long before Chen Shui-bian became president.

But in fact Taipei had already been won over to the taste of Tainan long before the election, thanks to Wangji Fucheng Zongzi restaurant. Meat zongzi (triangular cones of glutinous rice wrapped in bamboo leaves and stuffed with a filling) come in many forms--Taiwanese and mainland, northern Taiwanese and southern Taiwanese. The zongzi at Wangji Fucheng are of the southern Taiwanese type, made from rice that has been boiled until the grains merge, filled with a mush of boiled streaky pork and coated in a sprinkling of peanut powder. While

Wangji Fucheng's zongzi may lack some of the character of northern Taiwanese zongzi--which are more savory--they nevertheless reflect the unassuming virtues of the people of the south, giving full play to the stickiness and taste of glutinous rice.
 

No. 374, Pateh Rd. Sec. 2, Taipei  Tel: (02) 2775-4032

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