Dining With Dinosaurs in Taiwan

Earlier this year a chain of dino-themed restaurants, called T-REX, started to open in the United States, but a restaurant in Taiwan has been serving up meals in the shadow of dinosaurs for much longer. The three-story Jurassic Restaurant in Taipei opened in 1988, five years before Jurassic Park spurred a new phase of dino-mania. The menu is traditional ("stinky tofu and frogs cooked in soy sauce"), but it is the decor visitors come for.

The inside and outside of the restaurant are adorned with dinosaurs and other miscellaneous knickknacks, most notably sculpted dinosaur skeletons. According to an article about the restaurant written for New Tang Dynasty Television, Jurassic Restaurant was launched during a time when there was a glut of wild-west-themed establishments in Taipei. Those have mostly slipped into extinction, but Jurassic Restaurant holds on.

Riley Black | | READ MORE

Riley Black is the author of The Last Days of the Dinosaurs and many other books. She is a science correspondent for Smithsonian magazine covering fossils and natural history, and she writes about the prehistoric past for a variety of publications.