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Christmas is a special season where the magic happens and most assuredly the excitement welcomingly builds up for the celebration of the coming of another new year. Here at Dew, it couldn’t be truer. We have reinvented ourselves specifically for this December and taken some of the most all-time favorites across the world to share them with you. You will find the old classics, but also some modern twists that cater indulgently to your palate. French onion soup with a flair for the holiday season, chocolate gâteau tartelette with a humor, and charcuterie with a light touch. Come and join us at Dew–where the story and the action unfolds before your eyes.

For me, the festive season is about comfort, warmth, and familiarity. We take what is familiar and dear to us and dress it up to top off another notch so that all of us friends and relatives would all be on the same page to enjoy that comfort food, but with an elevated sensation-kind of like how we would wear that particular favorite dress for the occasion, but accentuate it with a red glittering scarf for the festivity. Therefore, in this festive season of December, we take you on a tour to visit the world of street food, From small to big bites, crispy to succulent, and savory to sweet, we have got you covered. Imagine the tortilla tacos in Mexico, the crispy olive bread in Italy, the filling filled pumpkin bread pie in the USA, and the sweet mini tartelettes in France. Indulge your palates in these little delights for a true festive season of December!

I am a North American kid. It was not until I set my foot out in the world did I bother with the realization that not every nation eats turkey for Christmas dinner. In Switzerland, Filet im Teig or pastry with pork sausage meat is celebrated instead, or in Slovenia, bakalá or dried salted cod is eaten, and in Mexico, tamale or corn pastry is the must-include household dish for such a festive season. As a celebration for this regional yet diverse choice of ingredient for Christmas dinner, Dew will also choose something local that is iconic to every household staple of the lives on the Formosan Island—pork. Since we are visiting the street food on the various corners of the earth this season, we start off with pork belly taco—that is quite familiar to Taiwanese, such as the Spring Roll or the Pekin Duck Tortilla Dish. Braised pork belly will be wrapped inside cabbage, while the macadamia mousse and the mole sauce provide a nice condiment that adds accent and texture to this street food.

Christmas is family time together—you can either spend it at the comfort of the house before a hearth or travel to somewhere warm with your dearest. And Dew might just be able to give you both. You can enjoy various flavors without the hassle of traveling abroad. This season, we are taking you on a world tour to try different street foods that are celebrated in various parts of the world. To name a few, we will be visiting Greece, France, Mexico, Sweden, Italy, and etc. To celebrate such a festive spirit, we will also be sharing something special, something sweet that is normally only served during Christmas. Come and find out yourself, and indulge in the world of flavors.

Taichung date restaurant

Dude, So Few Meat Dishes!

I was often prompted with that question regarding my menus.
And you are absolutely right about it—especially for the carnivores, such a menu might come off as a big disappointment.
But there are more reasons beyond the obvious on why Dew’s dishes are more vegetable driven and focused that are worth explaining.
There are several reasons of course.
But reiterating the obvious is that every establishment has their own identity that they project and characterize, such as the BBQ Smokehouse that is focused on meat or the Hot Pot that is more soup based specialty.
One rhetoric worth pointing out—that is often left out of the equation—which I leave to question, is that since when did we start the practice of correlating our expectation with the price of the menu to automatically translate the inclusion of the expensive ingredients, such as the prized cuts of meat, or the rare seafood as a common norm?

Shouldn’t that be left to the restaurant’s discretion?
Before we set out to open our door to the public, Restaurant Dew has several objectives in place that are consciously defined which we believe strongly characterize ourselves and are important as part of our identity.
Like people with different names and unique personalities, we did not set out to be just another regular Joe, who does the over abused spaghetti, and risotto dishes that are assumed to be Italian or anything not Italian, is expensive, and then automatically slapped with the sticker of being French, even if they are not, or anything fermented, is then considered as Scandinavian.
Adding the fuel to this fire of confusion and ignorance is that the average diners are so often caught up with their own expectations of the versions of the meals that they themselves define—which is often further obfuscated by the disinformation on the social networks—that the necessary and basic homework that rests on the diners to understand clearly about an establishment they are about to visit gets lost in the translation.
There are the simple day-to-day meals for basic sustenance, and there are the comfort meals for nurturing the body and the soul, and there are the more expensive meals for special occasions, and then there are the less-than-typical meals with a statement for the adventurous, philosophical, and avant-garde.
The dishes served at Dew are about innovations, foreshadowings, and responsibilities.
I think the profession and the role of a chef is more important than ever in this modern day.
Chefs play the intermediary role between bridging the farmers and the suppliers who have the very first hand knowledge on the problems they may have faced during the practice of cultivation of the crops on the land itself and the final vector of the consumers who are the diners themselves.
Thus, chefs have a responsibility in relaying the knowledge of what is at stake to both the farmers and the diners which, in turn, may fuel and sustain or break this very cycle of sustenance production that is closely dependent upon each other.
hefs spend their entire career dealing with the preparation of food, but the preparation spans more than just the cooking itself—it is also about understanding how an ingredient is produced, the journeys it made behind its appearance on the market, and if it is fairly traded between the cultivators and the conscientious farming practice conducted on the lands at the very global village level.
We made an objective for Dew to be a green restaurant—that is about sustainability, avoiding wastage, reusing instead of recycling in our day-to-day operations.

Therefore we prefer the local over the imported, repurposing the trimmings and leftovers back into our dishes, and avoiding the extensive carbon footprints funneled into acquiring the prized and rare ingredients nowadays people take for granted.

Faced with the irrefutable facts of global warming and environmental destruction caused by our practices for food production throughout the world that would eventually circle back to impact severely the livelihood of our crops, chefs should be even more diligent in raising the awareness of sustainable farming and coming up with ways to maximize the currently available ingredients to their full potential. And this is where innovation and creativity comes in.

When faced with what is only seasonally available, we need to reinvent and challenge ourselves with more ideas than ever, and develop techniques to create dishes that are diverse in flavors and fun to enjoy despite utilizing the same and commonly found ingredients.

It is also through this practice that we keep ourselves on our toes so that in times of need and scarcity, we would still be resilient.
Pickling and fermenting then, in this sense, is a necessity rather than a trendy practice simply because everyone is doing it.
The benefits of the plants are recognized by many and are further supported by science.

The categories of the plants greatly outrank the types of meat available to the general public.
Knowing this, another part of the objective that Dew aims to achieve is to utilize as many plants as possible to showcase the dishes that deserve its own merit, just as the star is the steak course to also that of a vegetable course.
These objectives define the type of restaurant and the cuisine at Dew really is, which is certainly not explained by the competitive photos often lacking the contexts flooding the social media.
Just as there are work ethics inherent in each profession, chefs themselves need to be more vigilant as they are inevitably intertwined in the roles of life and death, and nurture and sacrifice.
This is how I strife to think that we chefs are doing our ethical part—educating the public through our cuisines, fulfilling our responsible roles to be more sustainable, and together, adjusting and amending our practices supported by science for a better ameliorated future.

Xmas dinner / Christmas celebration / new yeear dinner / happy hanukkah / christmas turkey / special Xmas dinner