“Best Stromboli you ever have!” reads the catchy caption at the top of Amore Pizzeria’s menu. That wouldn’t have been hard — I’d never had a Stromboli before entering Amore, which opened last month across the street from National Taiwan University on Xinhai Road. But after one bite of the fragrant, moist and meaty concoction that was presented to me 10 minutes after ordering, I was glad I had ordered it.
And there’s more to Amore. “Best pizza in town!” boasts a sign out front — fightin’ words. But they aren’t merely hyperbole. The homemade dough was rolled and baked into a crust that was just the right thickness, slightly crispy around the crimping and underneath, and chewy everywhere else. Mozzarella and a homemade sauce, infused with Italian herbs, covered the pie.
Amore Pizzeria’s space is plain — so plain that one could easily confuse it, as I initially did, for just another cheap knock-off pizza joint playing off guileless university students wanting a quick bite. Brown is the color of choice here: brown booths, brown tables, brown chairs and brown stools running along a brown bar. A few framed pictures — Michelangelo’s David, a caprese salad — break up the monotony.
Photo: Noah Buchan, Taipei Times
Though the decor is drab, Amore’s amiable owner, James Chen (陳建堂), knows what he’s doing. Having learned to cook Italian food in the early 1980s in New Jersey from an old Italian who ran six restaurants, Chen spent the past three decades perfecting what he does best: pizza.
He shuttered his three New Jersey shops in 2008 following the financial downturn, returned to Taipei after a 30-year hiatus and found the pizza here was not to his liking. “What is this ketchup and sugar?” he says.
Chen uses extra-virgin olive oil in his dough (which he blesses, Catholic style, before quartering it off and rolling it up) and in his Caesar salad dressing (which had a rich anchovy and caper finish). He makes the sausage and meatballs himself from scratch — again, learned from the New Jersey Italian — as he does the pasta sauces.
Stromboli is a turnover pizza similar to a calzone, but its dough is thicker. Chen said calzones are often made with ricotta, whereas Stromboli are made with mozzarella. The base is a vegetarian combination of onion, green pepper, tomato sauce and cheese, to which I added pepperoni and sausage (NT$320).
First, a warning: The Stromboli comes to the table piping hot and doesn’t cool off for quite a while, which can be dangerous. Generous slices of slightly spicy pepperoni and peppery sausage were evenly placed throughout the inside, so that a meaty morsel was found in every bite of bread.
Amore’s 12-inch supreme pizza (NT$480) earns its moniker. I haven’t seen so many toppings — sausage, meatball, pepperoni, green pepper and onion — for a long time. It may be possible that there are too many toppings. A rare case of too much of a good thing.
Next week, candidates will officially register to run for chair of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). By the end of Friday, we will know who has registered for the Oct. 18 election. The number of declared candidates has been fluctuating daily. Some candidates registering may be disqualified, so the final list may be in flux for weeks. The list of likely candidates ranges from deep blue to deeper blue to deepest blue, bordering on red (pro-Chinese Communist Party, CCP). Unless current Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) can be convinced to run for re-election, the party looks likely to shift towards more hardline
Sept. 15 to Sept. 21 A Bhutanese princess caught at Taoyuan Airport with 22 rhino horns — worth about NT$31 million today — might have been just another curious front-page story. But the Sept. 17, 1993 incident came at a sensitive moment. Taiwan, dubbed “Die-wan” by the British conservationist group Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), was under international fire for being a major hub for rhino horn. Just 10 days earlier, US secretary of the interior Bruce Babbitt had recommended sanctions against Taiwan for its “failure to end its participation in rhinoceros horn trade.” Even though Taiwan had restricted imports since 1985 and enacted
Enter the Dragon 13 will bring Taiwan’s first taste of Dirty Boxing Sunday at Taipei Gymnasium, one highlight of a mixed-rules card blending new formats with traditional MMA. The undercard starts at 10:30am, with the main card beginning at 4pm. Tickets are NT$1,200. Dirty Boxing is a US-born ruleset popularized by fighters Mike Perry and Jon Jones as an alternative to boxing. The format has gained traction overseas, with its inaugural championship streamed free to millions on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Taiwan’s version allows punches and elbows with clinch striking, but bans kicks, knees and takedowns. The rules are stricter than the
“Far from being a rock or island … it turns out that the best metaphor to describe the human body is ‘sponge.’ We’re permeable,” write Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie in their book Slow Death By Rubber Duck: The Secret Danger of Everyday Things. While the permeability of our cells is key to being alive, it also means we absorb more potentially harmful substances than we realize. Studies have found a number of chemical residues in human breast milk, urine and water systems. Many of them are endocrine disruptors, which can interfere with the body’s natural hormones. “They can mimic, block
RSS