TAIPEI’S TOP TABLES
Michelin stars of Taiwan’s diverse fine dining scene
While Taiwan’s street food is well-known, its high-end restaurant scene has flown under the radar for too long. The launch of the inaugural Taipei Michelin Guide in 2018 brought the capital into the limelight, and placed it on the international culinary map. In its second year, the guide (the launch of the 2020 edition has been postponed to Q3) awarded one to three stars to 24 establishments, offering plenty of choices for the travelling gourmand.
Taiwan is blessed with a diversity of microclimates that allow a myriad of produce to thrive. It is also surrounded by waters rich with marine life, and mountains of which 30 percent is arable. There is a culture of eating local and seasonal based on the Farmer’s Almanac for the best tastes and nutrients the produce can offer. The abundance of nature’s bounty and a deeprooted farming tradition that yields the best crops have drawn chefs back from overseas and also drawn established foreign chefs. In Taiwan, they experiment widely with local produce, using foreign techniques.
Unlike many chefs his generation, Taiwan-born and US-raised Paul Lee didn’t become a chef mid-career. Being a chef was his childhood ambition and he has been training to be one since young. In 2018, he opened Impromptu by Paul Lee at Regent Taipei and earned a star less than a year later. Though trained in French fine dining, Chef Lee, who served as executive chef at California Patina and Las Vegas Le Cirque before returning to Taipei, prefers to serve cuisine that doesn’t really fit into a particular genre. He prefers to be led by inspirations of creating new flavour and texture combinations, hence the name of the restaurant.
And sometimes, these creations may sound rather odd. One of them is the white chocolate bread pudding with nitro foie gras, which has become a fixture on the omakase menu. Though the idea may put some off, most diners love how the gamey goose liver turns sweet on the tongue when paired as a dessert. The egg noodles tossed with lobster chunks and burnt scallions in a lobster-bisque reduction is also an umami paradise.
History also plays a part in shaping Taipei’s colourful culinary scene. When Chiang Kai Shek left China after the civil war between Kuomintang and the Chinese Nationalist Party, he brought with him the