Large New Restaurant on the Grounds of the Palace Museum in Taipei, Silks Palace

In the Shilin section of Taipei, between the main Palace Museum Building and the newer second exhibition space that houses special exhibits with a separate admission charge is a mammoth new restaurant, Silks Palace. The full address is 3F, No 41 Zhongshan North Road, Second Section, but going into the Palace Museum, the restaurant's location is very obvious: off to the left, just off the pathways to the second exhibition hall.

The lowest floor serves Taiwanese food, including the "Famed Formosa Feast" which includes DongGang salt-and-pepper shrimp, Yilan crisp melon duck, 5-flavor abalone wrapped in bamboo. onion and garlic flavored Buddha Tureen Soup, Sauteed Scallop and Clam with Hualien Wild Mountain Vegetable (greens), Crispy Toast Stuffed with Penghu Lobster in Cream Sauce, sweet and salty Tainan Tree Nut and Pineapple with Garoupa, Dapeng Bay Eel with Miaoli Glutinous Rice Cake, Pineapple Cake and Traditional Taiwanese Shaved Ice for dessert. The price for the feast isis NT$2,000+10% service charge per person.

At noon on a day when the mercury stood at 35C (about 100F) after a big breakfast buffet, so much food was unthinkable, and we opted for Cantonese dim sum on the second floor-which is also ground level from a different side higher up the mountainside.

Taiwan is a major grower and exporter of tea, especially the best Oolong, but I had to order "Iron Buddha Tea" to find out what it was. It turned out to be a fermented red tea. I should have asked for a bucket of ice. It was good hot, but I think it would have been even better iced. I got a large pot for NT$50 and Keelung got a large pot of chrysanthemum tea for the same price. Other choices were Jasmine, Pouchong, and TieGuanYin.

I wanted to compare some standard dim sum dishes to back home (San Francisco). The shrimp dumplings (har gou) were very good, the tofu skin stuffed with shrimp and pork was inferior to my weekly fare. I know that traditional siu mai (pork dumpling wrapped in rice paste) only includes pork, though I prefer the Bay Area adaptation of including shrimp in it.

Fried onion cake was not on the menu, so we tried an onion pastry that was quite good-flakey with sesame seeds on the outside, and not very oniony at all. We also tried a deep fried dish with mushroom and shrimp inside.

The one disappointment was a bit of "Peiking duck," which was almost all wrapper with no duck taste, though a bit of duck skin texture.

For dessert, I was not expecting to find what we call "Heavenly Egg Yolk Buns" (a yellow baked dish with sugared egg yolk thicker than custard inside). That Bay Area fusion is the only Chinese dessert I really like, so the basis for choice from the Silks Palace dessert menu was curiosity. The menu did not explain what "Rolling Donkey" is in either English or Chinese, and I assume not in Japanese either. Keelung predicted that it would be sweetened red bean paste. He was right. The paste was inside somewhat spongy pastry, like American icecream roll with only one layer. It was palatable, which is the most I hope for from a Chinese dessert.

The total bill was 870 NT$870 plus the ten-percent service charge: about $32, in the neighborhood of our weekly foray to Dim Sum King. Seven dishes, a bit less food.

The service was good, even after the restaurant filled up (with mostly Japanese tourists). I failed to think to check out the rest rooms.

I don't see Silks Palace as a destination dim sum restaurant (it may be a destination Formosan Feast one), but it is there to feed visitors to the Palace Museum, the number-one site for internal and external travelers to Taiwan... and just up the hill from the Shung Ye Museum of Formosan Aborigines and the Soka Fine Arts Museum.

BTW, there is a coffee shop in the vicinity, and a tea house that serves dim sum atop the Palace Museum. Also, private dining rooms (banquet halls) are available for rent on the third floor of the building.