The “CN Tower” of Taiwan is the Taipei 101. It’s a marvel of engineering with 101 floors and a big mass damper somewhere in the middle to protect against high winds during typhoon season and an occasional earthquake. Most of the floors were inaccessible to us (I guess they were office floors) and the floors that we were able to visit were occupied by high-end fashion stores.

In fact, the whole area around Taipei 101 was built for shopping. We walked around for a bit, into some of the stores but didn’t buy anything. After walking around for awhile, we were famished and needed some food. We just happened to be at Taipei 101 and decided to eat at one of the 85^th floor restaurants to kill two birds with one stone.

We decided on the Chinese place, and that was Shin Yeh. We didn’t do any research beforehand (although it’s a suggested stop in a variety of places such as the NY Times) but as it turns out the place was rather empty. Although maybe it’s because we showed up at 2:30 in the afternoon on a weekday.

The had set dinner and lunches, as well as à la carte. We ordered one lunch set and several other items. The items in the set lunch were better presented, but all-in-all; their food just wasn’t that special. I guess you just pay for the view rather than the chef.

We ended up paying something like $85 CDN after credit card conversion for the meal. We over-ordered somewhat because of the per-person minimum (which was only like NTD900 < $30 CDN) but for the food, it was still a bit expensive considering how cheap food is elsewhere in Taipei.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: asia09, restaurants, taiwan, travelling