For the last three years, Maryjane Pizza off Shida Road (師大路) has been serving satisfying thin-crust pizzas at extremely reasonable prices. So it's somewhat surprising how little attention the place has received from English-language media, blogs and other Web sites included.
This hasn't stopped the cozy little restaurant four lanes north of Grandma Nitti's from building a sizeable reputation among expats and foreign students as a good place to go for a couple of reasons.
It's a great place for lunch, when a 10-inch pepperoni or veggie pizza, a glass of iced tea and a salad will set you back a mere NT$180. It's also a great place for an inexpensive date. The atmosphere is welcoming and casual with good lighting and tasteful artwork hanging from the walls. A carafe of house wine is only NT$230 and beers are buy-one-get-one free in summer. There's even a shady deck.
PHOTO: RON BROWNLOW, TAIPEI TIMES
So how was the pizza? I visited Maryjane's four times over the past two months, ordering the pepperoni (NT$160), the artichoke (NT$180) and the Greek (NT$200) pizzas. Of these, my favorite was the pepperoni. As with most Taipei restaurants that serve good pizzas, the crust is slightly dry. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and it balances well with a topping like pepperoni.
Likewise with Maryjane's pesto chicken pizza (NT$250), which I have not tried — yet — but which several of my friends recommend. It's topped with chicken breast, feta cheese, sliced tomatoes and a homemade pesto sauce.
Another example of a good balance was the Greek pizza, with feta cheese, onions, black olives, mushrooms, green peppers and cherry tomatoes over the standard tomato and mozzarella crust. I would have preferred more than one variety of mushroom and more feta cheese, but otherwise was pleased with the vegetables, which were fresh and came in just the right quantity.
If you like artichokes, I recommend ordering them with another topping, as for me, a mozzarella and tomato pizza with just artichokes tastes a bit dry. Maryjane lets customers build their own pizza for NT$140, plus NT$20 or NT$30 for each of two-dozen toppings.
Note: Maryjane is popular and its pizzas are hand-made and baked in a stone-base oven, so customers visiting during peak dinner hours sometimes have to wait for seats. Check the Web site for free soup and desert coupons.
If one asks Taiwanese why house prices are so high or why the nation is so built up or why certain policies cannot be carried out, one common answer is that “Taiwan is too small.” This is actually true, though not in the way people think. The National Property Administration (NPA), responsible for tracking and managing the government’s real estate assets, maintains statistics on how much land the government owns. As of the end of last year, land for official use constituted 293,655 hectares, for public use 1,732,513 hectares, for non-public use 216,972 hectares and for state enterprises 34 hectares, yielding
The small platform at Duoliang Train Station in Taitung County’s Taimali Township (太麻里) served villagers from 1992 to 2006, but was eventually shut down due to lack of use. Just 10 years later, the abandoned train station had become widely known as the most beautiful station in Taiwan, and visitors were so frequent that the village had to start restricting traffic. Nowadays, Duoliang Village (多良) is known as a bit of a tourist trap, with a mandatory, albeit modest, admission fee of NT$10 giving access to a crowded lane of vendors with a mediocre view of the ocean and the trains
Traditionally, indigenous people in Taiwan’s mountains practice swidden cultivation, or “slash and burn” agriculture, a practice common in human history. According to a 2016 research article in the International Journal of Environmental Sustainability, among the Atayal people, this began with a search for suitable forested slopeland. The trees are burnt for fertilizer and the land cleared of stones. The stones and wood are then piled up to make fences, while both dead and standing trees are retained on the plot. The fences are used to grow climbing crops like squash and beans. The plot itself supports farming for three years.
President William Lai (賴清德) on Nov. 25 last year announced in a Washington Post op-ed that “my government will introduce a historic US$40 billion supplementary defense budget, an investment that underscores our commitment to defending Taiwan’s democracy.” Lai promised “significant new arms acquisitions from the United States” and to “invest in cutting-edge technologies and expand Taiwan’s defense industrial base,” to “bolster deterrence by inserting greater costs and uncertainties into Beijing’s decision-making on the use of force.” Announcing it in the Washington Post was a strategic gamble, both geopolitically and domestically, with Taiwan’s international credibility at stake. But Lai’s message was exactly
RSS