At the luxurious Peony restaurant in Taipei, fine Japanese dining comes with a Geiger counter.
The Peony, at the heart of Taipei’s commercial district, is probably the first restaurant in the world after the Japan earthquake to offer customers – typically investment bankers from the Taipei 101 tower next door, or Japanese executives from nearby Sumitomo Mitsui – the option of checking their sashimi for radiation contamination.
“We didn’t want to put the Geiger counter out originally because we were afraid of losing it, but customers just kept asking us to scan their food for them and compare the reading with their friends’ dishes,” Erica Wang, restaurant manager, said.