The Shangri-La’s Far Eastern Plaza Hotel in Tainan is right next to the railway station and a huge shopping mall. It’s easy to find as it’s a 38 floor circular tower.
Our room on the 18th floor was big and had one of the largest beds I’ve ever slept in: in fact it was so big I measured it and it came to 9’ wide by 7’ long. There was also a spacious bathroom with separate shower and bath.
There should be reasonable views, but the windows were filthy.
There was very little in the way of tourist style restaurants nearby, so on the one night we stayed, we ate in the mezzanine bar on the 1st floor overlooking the pianist playing in the lobby. It was relatively empty and we sat in a screened pod and shared from a fairly western menu: a chicken and pepper spaghetti dish and fish and chips.
Breakfast, on the 10th floor, was the best we had in our three week tour of Taiwan as there was a huge choice in a compact area. But just in case we needed a little extra help to navigate the various sections, the paper place mat had a map of the various food stations. I decided to go Taiwanese and dry Dan Tsu mainly because there was a picture of what the dish looked like and so it wasn’t hard to go wrong. The chef had around six individual steamers that went into boiling water. He chose one of three types of noodle which was re-heated, as were bean sprouts and green leaves. A prawn was cooked in another and the whole lot was assembled with a piece of pork, minced beef and a hard boiled quail’s egg topping the dish before boiling hot stock was poured on to it. It was all very theatrical and very good, but slightly messy to eat particularly in a clean apricot-coloured tee-shirt. My partner opted for traditional eggs and ham from a delicious looking slab of meat carved by the chef. A selection of muffins and spiced banana bread really set us up for our day of sight seeing.
“Shangri La Far Eastern Plaza Hotel”:http://www.shangri-la.com/tainan/fareasternplazashangrila/
