So Free is as much a tribute to the LOHAS spirit as it is a pizzeria serving up some of the tastiest pies in town.
Opened last week, the hole-in-the-wall, located across from a park and up the street from Sababa in Gongguan (公館), resembles the inside of a small rustic cabin. Logs are stacked under the L-shaped bar — fuel for the custom-built brick oven in which the vegetarian pizzas are cooked.
Embers from the oven, which releases a pleasant aroma of burning wood, are placed in traditional wicker baskets and set on the long wooden bar for patrons to warm their hands. Two long wooden benches, the restaurant’s limited seating, face the kitchen area.
Like the restaurant’s architecture, So Free keeps the menu simple with an eye towards the environment and wholesome fare. There is a choice of six small pizzas (NT$120), with which there can be no mixing and matching of toppings.
The service is quick and the portions generous but not gluttonous. The pizza crusts are thin (those used to Pizza Hut might may think a little too thin) and cooked crispy on the outside with the center left soft and chewy.
The basil (pesto) mushroom is the only pie served without marinara sauce and is my favorite so far: slices of fresh king oyster mushrooms and onions on a bed of delicious homemade pesto sauce and topped with just the right amount of mozzarella cheese, and not too greasy.
The potato rosemary pizza sees the pesto sauce replaced with marinara. Generous amounts of diced potatoes make up the “meat” of this pie with dry rosemary sprinkled over the spuds and covered with mozzarella. I spent the first minute smelling the mouthwatering aroma of freshly cooked rosemary before digging in.
The other four pizza selections are mushroom and asparagus, smoked cheese, apple cinnamon and the somewhat bizarre ginger and egg (ginger superman).
The beverage menu is limited to organic barley tea (NT$20), a malt drink called Karamalz (NT$35), Perrier (NT$50) and apple juice (NT$65).
Yesterday, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) nominated legislator Puma Shen (沈伯洋) as their Taipei mayoral candidate, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) put their stamp of approval on Wei Ping-cheng (魏平政) as their candidate for Changhua County commissioner and former legislator Tsai Pi-ru (蔡壁如) of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) has begun the process to also run in Changhua, though she has not yet been formally nominated. All three news items are bizarre. The DPP has struggled with settling on a Taipei nominee. The only candidate who declared interest was Enoch Wu (吳怡農), but the party seemed determined to nominate anyone
In a sudden move last week, opposition lawmakers of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) passed a NT$780 billion special defense budget as a preemptive measure to stop either Chinese leader Xi Jinping (習近平) or US President Donald Trump from blocking US arms sales to Taiwan at their summit in Beijing, said KMT heavyweight Jaw Shaw-kong (趙少康), speaking to the Taipei Foreign Correspondents Club on Wednesday night in Taipei. The 76-year-old Jaw, a political talk show host who ran as the KMT’s vice presidential candidate in 2024, says that he personally brokered the deal to resolve
What government project has expropriated the most land in Taiwan? According to local media reports, it is the Taoyuan Aerotropolis, eating 2,500 hectares of land in its first phase, with more to come. Forty thousand people are expected to be displaced by the project. Naturally that enormous land grab is generating powerful pushback. Last week Chen Chien-ho (陳健和), a local resident of Jhuwei Borough (竹圍) in Taoyuan City’s Dayuan District (大園) filed a petition for constitutional review of the project after losing his case at the Taipei Administrative Court. The Administrative Court found in favor of nine other local landowners, but
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), alongside their smaller allies the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), are often accused of acting on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Some go so far as to call them “traitors.” It is not hard to see why. They regularly pass legislation to stymie the normal functioning of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) administration, and they have yet to pass this year’s annual budget. They slashed key elements of the government’s proposed NT$1.25 trillion (US$40 billion) special military budget, and in the smaller NT$780 billion package they did pass, it is riddled with provisions that
RSS