Taiwan may be a comparatively small place, but it’s well known for a few things: incredible eats, incredible technology, and the best Little League World Series teams this planet has ever seen. We’re experiencing the best of those first two this week at Computex, and since we were all the way over on the other side of the planet, we couldn’t help but stop by the Windows 7-themed eatery that opened up for just a couple of months surrounding the nation’s only hosted consumer electronics show of this magnitude. The place, as we were told by the one and only Andy Yang from Engadget Chinese, is Taiwanese through and though. It typically goes by 100 Seafood, but for a couple of months it has been transformed into a 64-bit dining location with Windows 7 wallpaper, stickers, banners, and even mugs. Each day there’s a special menu item that sells for just NT$77 (around $2.38 in the US), but considering that said special was some form of intestines on the evening that we showed up, Engadget and company sprung for dishes with a bit less relation to the digestive system. In all seriousness, the grub hit the spot after a long day on the trade show floor, and the take-home mugs for us media folk made the journey even more worthwhile. Now, to see if the lid closes over if we don’t activate the thing in 30 days…

Take a trip to this magical place yourself in the galleries below, or do one even better and jump past the break for a video!

Continue reading Engadget dines at Taipei’s Windows 7-themed restaurant (video)

Engadget dines at Taipei’s Windows 7-themed restaurant (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 03 Jun 2010 21:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We (falsely) assumed that the Windows 7 Whopper would be the last food item ever associated with an operating system, and now we’re quite literally eating our words. As the story goes, a Hot Fried 77 restaurant has opened up over in Taiwan, offering tons of “Windows-themed meals” for NTD $77 (around $3 in Greenbacks), and judging by the cornucopia of images down there in the source, we’re guessing this is no prank. We’re debating whether laughing or crying is the appropriate emotion here.

Josh T.: “While you’re throwing .bak some fries and a burger, you should enjoy a .dll pickle.”
Nilay: “This is not what we meant by Windows 7 Server.”
Chris: “I’m a PC, and putting down a pint of Beast while installing Windows 7 was my idea.”
Richard Lai: “This is the real Windows Genuine Advantage.”
Joe: “We like to believe that Microsoft started with the restaurant and then reverse engineered an OS.”
Richard Lawler: “Obviously, there’s no word for Seagrams in their language.”
Darren: “You haven’t heard? Alcohol consumption by end-user is now listed in Minimum System Requirements.”
Josh F.: “When reading ‘serve it to us on a plate’ in a literal sense goes horribly right.”
Joanna: “Everything I come up with is just wrong.”
Don: “Can you tell me where the XP Cafe is?”
Paul: “Would you like that in 32-bit or 64-bit?”

[Thanks, Chris]

Caption contest: Windows 7-themed restaurant serves 64-bit grub in Taiwan originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 17 May 2010 12:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ever been surfing the net and wanted to tuck into some delicious rice? Now you can, kind of.

Condiments maker Ajinomoto has a new website, Neo Tamago Kake Gohan, in which users can log on and enjoy a virtual meal using the company’s trademarked Aji-no-moto MSG umami. For those who don’t know, tamago kake gohan (卵かけご飯) is a simple but nourishing dish consisting of beaten raw egg over steamed rice with soy sauce.

We all know the Japanese are fussy about food, so, not unsurprisingly, users can even customize their “meal”. Do you want a full bowl or just half? Tons of soy sauce or just a splash? You can make your own recipe, all set to dramatic music!

This kind of content revels in food and the process of eating, an activity which, any glance at Japanese TV tells you, really appeals to the local consumer. You get to experience a demonstration of how to make the dish, as well as of course seeing how Ajinomoto’s product looks like up close.

Ajinomoto is an old company established in 1925 and has been producing the same kinds of products for decades, but this kind of web campaign shows they can be “futuristic” and take digital tools seriously too. (However, surely it would have been more savvy if they had made a whole separate website, rather than a subdomain of the regular site?) There are also blog parts (see below!) that show the world your ideal tamago kake gohan recipe.

It takes a country as obsessed with food and as innovative in retail as Japan to make even cheap ready-to-eat noodles seem both the everyman’s meal as well as a famous brand.

Seven Eleven convenience stores are now offering the Atsumori Tsuken noodles, supervised by well-known Shinagawa restaurant Rokurinsha. You get to experience famously delicious food at a cheap price and without having to go further than your nearest conbini.

We also like how the packaging, rather than using yet another ubiquitous celebrity or even a good-looking model, has opted for down-to-earth image of a delivery man (the restaurant’s chef, in fact), emphasizing how this brand is being made accessible for everyone. It is appealing even to the construction worker consumer base — Atsumori Tsukemen is real food for real people!

This set is also available only in Tokyo’s twenty-three wards, cleverly playing on another key Japanese retail theme — limited edition. Get your hands on Atsumori Tsukemen for 498 JPY ($5.5), a bargain when you consider that at the “real” Rokurinsha it can cost almost 1,000 JPY ($11).

The T-fal Actifry promises to fry your favorite foods using just 1 tbsp of oil. Being an avid fan of deep fried miracles including chicken wings, onion rings and french fries, I just had to try it out.

Price

$300 – Out for about a year in the UK, just hitting the US market.

How It Works

I’ve described the Actifry to friends as an ice cream maker combined with a convection oven. Basically, it’s a big nonstick pan equipped with a constantly rotating silicone stirrer. You load all the food into the pan, drizzle it with a relatively small amount of oil and then close the clear lid. The controls include just two buttons—one for on/off, one for a timer. Fired up, hot air blows around making it sound, as you might expect, like a weak hairdryer. The idea is that the air blows the oil around and cooks the food while the spatula keeps everything cooking evenly.

The Cook-Off

I put the Actifry through three crucial tests, constantly questioning whether it was better than a convection oven. The first, chicken wings (buffalo style), because you can’t generally duplicate a the crunch of a fried wing in the oven. The second, sweet potato fries. (Battered food like onion rings will just gunk up the system, so I settled for something that’s also pretty difficult to oven fry.) And last, I made straight french fries—the devices biggest selling point by far.

Chicken Wings
I tossed, I don’t remember how many, chicken wings into the machine. I sprinkled them with a pinch of paprika and a tbsp of oil, then I let the machine go to work. 30 or so minutes later, I smelled that the chicken was done. And I had to admit, the pieces were a beautiful golden brown.

So I took a bite and…they were chewy, just as if I’d baked em. And actually, a bit overcooked as well, since I was going more for texture than taste.

Winner: Tie

Sweet Potato Fries
Traditionally, good sweet potato fries are considered difficult to make—even ordering them off a restaurant menu can be a crap shoot. I actually make great sweet potato fries in the oven, baking them for about 20 minutes before throwing the switch on convection to give each fry a bubbly, slightly crisp skin. Theoretically, the Actifry would cook the potatoes in a similar manner.
Theoretically. What I got, and it’s tough to see here, was basically a pile of fry-shaped mush. It tasted fine—you can’t really screw up a sweet potato—but the fries were limp and occasionally pulverized by the spatula. (The lamb chops, btw, were delicious.)

Winner: Oven

French Fries
At this point, the honeymoon is over. The Actifry is as big as a crock pot, and so far, it’s basically just a crock. But I’m willing to let it all pass if the Actifry is the ultimate healthy french fry machine. A decent fry can be baked, but getting the texture perfect, like a shattering yet silky crème brûlée or crusty yet gooey french bread, is an art tough to match by oven alone.

After cutting Idahos as equally as possible and rinsing away the extra starch, I fired up the Actifry, almost nervously, on behalf of T-fal.
What came out roughly half an hour later was admittedly good. Taking the first bite, I was surprised by the decent balance of crispness and mushy innards. The golden color wasn’t uniform, but I don’t mind a few extra crispy bites in my french fries, and had I attempted fries again, I may have let them cook even longer (and risked breaking them down for super crispiness).

Still, munching through the plate of potatoes with my wife, I realized 2 things. One, I’m not sure this is significantly better than what I could do in an oven (with an oil mister and a bit of flipping). And, two, I’m not sure this is significantly easier than what I could do with an oven. (After all, I still peeled and cut up a few fresh potatoes.)

Winner: Actifry…by a nose.

Mostly Just Hot Air

The Actifry isn’t necessarily a bad idea or a bad product, it’s just a product that 99% of us don’t need—and it’s hard to imagine that it really sells for $300. For french fries, I’d say it’s a bit superior to what the average Joe can pull off in an oven (results vary, I’m sure, resident chef-types). But most of the fried goodness you want to eat can be bastardized just as well with equipment you already own, if not better.

Or, you know, there’s always the option to actually cook foods by submerging them in hot fat. Deep frying is about as simple as cooking gets, if a bit messy and unhealthy. [T-fal]

Cooks decent french fries


Can’t cook much else


Costs $300 more than the oven you already own


Exceedingly healthy