Museum and Museum-Inspired Dinner

I managed to check out a famous tourist attraction for the first time during my short stay in Taipei. The National Palace Museum is known for its extensive collection of artifacts from Beijing's Forbidden City from the Imperial era. This time, not only I got a chance to explore the museum with a guided tour, we got to try the special menu inspired by the museum collection afterwards. 

A quick car ride from the hotel got us to the door at the museum right before it closes. With only little time spent in the museum we probably hardly scratched the surface of its vast collection but at least we saw a few of the more well-known pieces. The pair of Jadeite Cabbage and Meat-shaped Jasper Stone, as part of their permanent exhibition, are best known for the craftmanship, the amazing natural color of the precious stone and their resemblance to the real thing. 

I was glad that the Imperial Porcelain collection was on exhibit as part of the rotating series being showcased at the hall on the same floor. Enamel porcelain in late Qing Dynasty represented some of the most colorful and technically complex ceramics pieces combining the best of east and west. 

We went for an early dinner at Silks Palace in the gorgeous building next door built about a decade ago now as part of the museum complex. The facade was modern surrounded by glass structure but inside was classic with the wooden theme from the dining area on the ground floor up to the private rooms on higher levels. Before our dinner, we were given a dimsum workshop by the chef team to paint our own steamed sweet buns, based on an old Tang Dynasty drawing of the imperial servant maidens. 

Our dinner that followed continued with that art-inspired theme, with the courses followed that of an imperial feast with several dishes a rendition of some of the art pieces we have seen inside the museum. The “Buddha Jumps Over the Wall” was a classic delicacy, with double boiled soup with abalones, sea cucumbers and fish maw, served in individual portion in a porcelain shaped in the Ting Cauldron with String Decoration, an antique dated back to 400BC that is part of the museum collection. The “Prawn in the Snow” was said to be a remake of an imperial Tang Dynasty dish with the red sauteed prawn on a bed of soft and fluffy scrambled egg-white, like a serene snowy scene. 

The Chicken Wing Stuffed With Glutinous Rice was impressive – classic Cantonese with the chicken wing deboned and stuffed with cooked glutinous rice then deep-fried with the flavorful meat jus infused into the stuffing. Then there were the two famous exhibits of the museum that we have seen earlier – the piece of cabbage was served whole with winter melon and scallop gravy sauce, and the braised pork belly served exactly like the Meat-shaped Stone. Talk about edible art. 

We ended with petit fours served in an imperial style curio box, completed with, of course, the steamy hot bun with red bean filling that we have helped garnished earlier. Around the world a few museums have transformed their restaurant offerings from being an after-thought to a culinary destination in itself, from Nerua in Bilbao to the now-closed In Situ in San Francisco, and I can add this one to that list. 

Rest of the pictures: https://www.flickr.com/photos/g4gary/albums/72177720312079800

When? October 12 2023
Where? Silks Palace at National Palace Museum, 221 Chishan Road Section 2, Shilin, Taipei, Taiwan
故宮博物院故宮晶華 - 台灣台北市士林區至善路二段221號
Menu Highlights? Chicken Wing Stuffed with Glutinous Rice 香苗藏鳳袖
Web: www.silkspalace.com.tw/homepage-en