Taipei bakery is over the moon!



DATELINE TAIPEI – On the eve of the Mid Autumn Festival, the staff at Taipei’s Kuo Yuan Ye Bakery are working overtime making moon cakes, the traditional gift of the annual three-day festival.

The workers are used to this rush – being the oldest and biggest bakery in Taiwan, Kuo Yuan Ye is the largest supplier for the little round-shaped cakes made with flour, butter and stuffed with fruit or other yummy items.



A chef shows visitors how
to form the moon cakes and
then shows the results.



Since opening in 1867, the bakery has popped billions of moon cakes into their giant ovens. This year alone Kuo Yuan Ye will make 670,000 boxes to feed its 28 stores spread throughout Taiwan – each box consists of between 10 and 12 cakes, by the way.



The family that owns the bakery is one of Taiwan’s most famous and over the company’s 145-year history, they’ve amassed quite a collection of artifacts, which they now showcase in a tiny museum above their main Taipei store.

The collection features the oldest wooden forms used to shape the cakes as well as a beautiful collection of wedding cake boxes and garments – after moon cakes the company’s biggest business centres around the wedding industry. Up until 2010, the company had sold almost 2.4 million wedding boxes.



Brides from Taiwan and Japan choose from elaborate to humble boxes which are filled with cakes and other pastries and exchanged between the bride and groom during the ceremony or to guests. The beautifully decorated boxes cost between $50 and $150 Cdn. and that includes the delicious goodies. Most brides keep mementos from the wedding in the boxes afterwards.



Visiting groups to the bakery can get a lesson in making moon cakes from one of the shop’s best chefs. Afterwards, visitors get to eat what they make while enjoying a cup of traditional oolong tea – the kind Taiwan is most famous.

Moon cakes are very much part of the Chinese culture and now so too is the Kuo Yuan Ye Bakery Museum.

For more information on the bakery, go to www-e01267@kuos.com.tw





Taipei's famous dumpling restaurant Din Tai Fung well worth the wait

An army of cooks stand in a small kitchen
preparing the soup-filled dumplings all day.

DATELINE TAIWAN – You don’t come to this amazing country and not try the national dish – Xiao Long Bao, Taiwan’s dumpling equivalent to Hong Kong’s Dim Sum.

So, while touring Taipei, it made sense to stop at the most famous dumpling restaurant in the country, the original Din Tai Fung room located a short walk away from the city’s iconic Taipei 101 – until recently the tallest building in the world.

I arrived just before noon and already the lineup stretched outside the restaurant onto the street – a normal scene I’m told.

The line moves quickly, though, and soon I’m sitting at a table on the third floor of the four-storey restaurant, which opened in what’s known as Taipei’s Section 2 in the 1970s.

The baskets of Xiao Long Bao started arriving shortly after and although I’ve enjoyed the dish before in Toronto, it never tasted this good – the wrapping that holds the soup and meat in place melted as soon as it touched my tongue and the hot broth was unlike anything I’ve ever tried before.

The pillows of goodness come in a number of varieties and an army of chefs huddle in a small kitchen off the main entrance making them all day – in excess of 10,000 a day.

The restaurant is the most famous in Taipei, written about by the likes of the New York Times, and many of the patrons are foreigners who just have to try something they’ve read about.

They’re not disappointed. I’ll have more on Din Tai Fung in upcoming issues of TraveLife so stay tuned.

9/11 ghosts still haunt air travelers



DATELINE TAIPEI – It never dawned on me when I made arrangements to visit Taiwan that I would be flying on 9/11.

My friends, however, were quick to remind me.

I got here safely, thanks to Eva Air, but there were many empty seats on a flight out of Toronto that I’m told by airline officials is “pretty” full most nights.

So, on the 10th anniversary of the most horrific of terrorist plots against the United States and the free world, I’m left to assume that the ghosts of those who carried out the cowardly attacks on New York and Washington are still haunting us.

But so much has changed since that dreadful day – air travel will never be the same again.

And that’s a good thing, in my opinion. Pre-9/11 air travel was too lax and that resulted in hijackings and bombings against civilian airlines long before Osama Bin Laden and his thugs were ever heard from. The chances of madmen turning civilian airlines into “missiles” again has been greatly reduced now thanks to the security checks implemented post 9/11 – if they had been in place on that dreadful day; well, we’re only left to speculate.

Air travel has always been the safest form of travel and it’s been made even safer since 9/11 – too bad so many people had to pay the ultimate price to make it happen.