Come On! Italy is a mid-range Italian-style eatery located in the web of alleys behind the Sogo department store on Zhongxiao East Road (忠孝東路) that specializes in thin-crust pizza and pasta dishes.
The restaurant’s decor veers towards the simple — unadorned white walls — with cozy flourishes. Its large and homey plush sofas upholstered in gray and emerald and large cushioned chairs are ideal for whiling away a few hours with friends.
We ordered the spinach and cheese pizza (NT$220) and spaghetti with chicken and four cheeses sauce (NT$300).
I picked the set meal (add NT$80), which includes soup or salad, bread roll, drink and dessert, with the pasta because the kitchen didn’t have the ingredients to make the caprese salad (NT$120) I originally wanted. The extra expenditure wasn’t worth it.
The pumpkin soup was a bland concoction sprinkled with dried parsley. Adding some apple or ginger might have given it depth. The disappointing first course was offset, but only slightly, by the whole wheat bread that had just come from the oven. I left it on the plate until the pasta arrived.
The creamy sauce was an ambrosial mix of Parmesan, mozzarella, Gorgonzola and ricotta. Its lack of oiliness and robust flavor suggested that the chef emphasized the cheese rather than cream or butter as the sauce’s primary ingredients.
Topped with ricotta, garlic and a slightly spicy pepperoni that I ordered as an extra (NT$50), and a rich and piquant tomato sauce, the thin-crust spinach and cheese pizza was significantly larger than expected.
This dining experience ended, however, as it had begun, with a blunder — this time in the shape of dry and crumbly chocolate sponge cake that had been in the cooler a little too long.
For the price, Come On! Italy is worth a visit. But avoid the set meal as it only detracts from what the restaurant does right: pizza and pasta.
In a strange omission, no wines are to be found on the menu. My server said, however, that customers would not be charged corkage if they brought their own.
Note: Some menu prices on Come On! Italy’s Web site have not been updated.
May 11 to May 18 The original Taichung Railway Station was long thought to have been completely razed. Opening on May 15, 1905, the one-story wooden structure soon outgrew its purpose and was replaced in 1917 by a grandiose, Western-style station. During construction on the third-generation station in 2017, workers discovered the service pit for the original station’s locomotive depot. A year later, a small wooden building on site was determined by historians to be the first stationmaster’s office, built around 1908. With these findings, the Taichung Railway Station Cultural Park now boasts that it has
Wooden houses wedged between concrete, crumbling brick facades with roofs gaping to the sky, and tiled art deco buildings down narrow alleyways: Taichung Central District’s (中區) aging architecture reveals both the allure and reality of the old downtown. From Indigenous settlement to capital under Qing Dynasty rule through to Japanese colonization, Taichung’s Central District holds a long and layered history. The bygone beauty of its streets once earned it the nickname “Little Kyoto.” Since the late eighties, however, the shifting of economic and government centers westward signaled a gradual decline in the area’s evolving fortunes. With the regeneration of the once
The latest Formosa poll released at the end of last month shows confidence in President William Lai (賴清德) plunged 8.1 percent, while satisfaction with the Lai administration fared worse with a drop of 8.5 percent. Those lacking confidence in Lai jumped by 6 percent and dissatisfaction in his administration spiked up 6.7 percent. Confidence in Lai is still strong at 48.6 percent, compared to 43 percent lacking confidence — but this is his worst result overall since he took office. For the first time, dissatisfaction with his administration surpassed satisfaction, 47.3 to 47.1 percent. Though statistically a tie, for most
In February of this year the Taipei Times reported on the visit of Lienchiang County Commissioner Wang Chung-ming (王忠銘) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and a delegation to a lantern festival in Fuzhou’s Mawei District in Fujian Province. “Today, Mawei and Matsu jointly marked the lantern festival,” Wang was quoted as saying, adding that both sides “being of one people,” is a cause for joy. Wang was passing around a common claim of officials of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the PRC’s allies and supporters in Taiwan — KMT and the Taiwan People’s Party — and elsewhere: Taiwan and
RSS