Escape 41

海洋天堂歐風餐館

No. 41-2, Chaishan Da Rd, Gushan Dist
高雄市鼓山區柴山大路41-2號
(07)525-0058

Monday-Sunday
12:00pm-11:00pm

facebook: https://www.facebook.com/escape41.tw

English friendly: yes
vegetarian friendly: yes
average cost: 300-400NTD

To get to this restaurant you have to take a long journey through NSYSU on terrifying twisty mountain roads, wild dogs (and monkeys?) popping up on either side, then turn off onto a series of terrifying steep little streets that drop you unceremoniously at the ocean's edge.

So actually, getting here was the best part of the evening. One could even say, it all went downhill from there... Ho ho.

I didn't take a picture of the incredible outside seating, but FYI it is incredible. The tables look RIGHT over the ocean; there were even a couple of times I was afraid the waves would splash up onto our table. Smarter people than I should come here in the early evening to watch the sunset.

I'm extra glad we were able to sit outside, even though it was way dark and a little cold, because the playlist they had going on inside the restaurant was terrible. Its terribleness was further emphasised by the fact that there were NO other customers there. At 7:00pm on a Sunday. So. If you want to come here, better make it sooner rather than later. I think Escape 41 is not long for this world.

For those of you who haven't heard, the owner of this restaurant is an Australian guy famous in many circles for owning a restaurant while being Australian. So it's a Western restaurant, and is obliged to serve pizza and pasta. I was also intruigued to see a selection of scones(!), smoothies, and lasagna, all of them pretty rare in this hemisphere.

Most important for you all, I think, is their wide selection of drinks (alcoholic and non-)! Indeed I would recommend coming here to drink over coming here to eat; you'll see why in a second.

The best part of this meal was probably the soup of the day: a tart tomato vegetable thing with chucks of delicious garlicy croutons (surely handmade, because they were good). The croutons, the sharp flavor, and the soup-like consistency were all spot on. A western soup they might actually serve in a western country.

If only it hadn't been so good, I wouldn't have gotten my hopes up for the rest of the meal...

Here we have seaweed flavor French fries (and the ocean, hello!). These were definitely not bad; if you like blocky thick-cut fries you should be perfectly satisfied. The seaweed coating was also totes addictive.

But this. Oh, this. I ordered the "owner's special", a vegetarian pizza with pesto, mushrooms, onions and all other sorts of things that are supposed to be delicious. This pizza was so bad I actively disliked eating it. The crust was completely tasteless/textureless, the onions were undercooked (as white as freshly fallen snow), the cubes of fried potato... were cubes of fried potato (whyyy), and there was something SERIOUSLY WRONG with the pesto. It probably had basil in it, somewhere, but the sour kind that goes with beef noodle soup. NOT the type you put on a pizza.

The ham and cheese lasagna my friend ordered was slightly better, but still pretty bad. Think "soggy microwave lasagna" quality. It was waaay too mushy to be served in any respectable Western restaurant--but of course this is Taiwan.

I want to give this place a 2/5, based soley on the horror that was that pizza, but I think the location and the drink menu can make up an extra point. Just don't get your hopes up about the food.

OVERALL RATING: 3/5

Andy's Pizza Garden

安迪的披薩花園

No. 273, Yucheng Rd, Zuoying Dist
高雄市左營區裕誠路273號
(07)557-2889

Monday-Sunday
11:30am-10:00pm

facebook: https://www.facebook.com/toaroach

English friendly: overly
vegetarian friendly: yes
average cost: 200-300NTD

The first Taiwanese food blog I opened up in order to copy+paste the pertinent information above (ahem) advertised this place as "高雄老外公認最好吃的家鄉味披薩喔": "widely accepted among Kaohsiung foreigners as the most delicious hometown flavor pizza!" That's what I concluded too, when on a whim this afternoon I googled "Kaohsiung best pizza" in English on The Internet. Well, *I* am a Kaohsiung 老外 too and I'm here to tell you that it is NOT the most delicious hometown flavor pizza in Kaohsiung. It can't be, it just can't.

It is definitely a foreigner's pizza place though: most of the reviews online are in English, as were a majority of the Tuesday night customers.

Their pizza is made by hand and cooked in a brick oven right in front of the shop. Just look at the American neon sign! The quaint pile of chopped wood! How could it possibly go wrong? 

Our first sign should have been the complete dearth of customers when we entered at 6:30pm on a Tuesday...

The do get props for having reasonable prices, and an actually English English menu. I say this place is "overly" English friendly because the waitress, assumedly the hot Taiwanese wife of the charateristic Californian expat owner (for the record all I'm going on here is his purple tye-dye T-shirt), was the type to respond to me in English when I talked to her in Chinese. This kind of behavior really pisses me off, but your mileage may vary.

Though it is Andy's Pizza Garden, we both ordered calzones. WHATEVER. I can no longer make dining choices based on what would be good for the blog. That way lies madness. A calzone is pretty much a pizza anyway, and a very rare creature in Kaohsiung besides. Apparently in Chinese it translates to 披薩餃 or "pizza dumpling", which is adorable.

The name was the best part about it though. I chose the "Niaosong Veggie" calzone, medium, with extra olives. Their menu has a wide selection of additional toppings for minimal extra charge, though they don't have artichoke hearts anymore because "no one orders them" (what did you think I was trying to do?!?) and I don't actually remember any olives ending up in my calizone. SO.

I was promised mushrooms, broccoli, spinach and other vegetables stuffed along with feta cheese (and olives, dammit!) into a lovingly homemade pizza shell; what I got was soggy broccoli, onions, other bland vegetables (maybe just more onions) punctuating giant gobs of tasteless mozzarella cheese inside a tasteless powdery pizza shell. If I hadn't seen feta cheese inside, I wouldn't have known it was there.

My Taiwanese friend ordered a meat calzone, purported to come with ham, beef, pepperoni and Italian sausage. On the Chinese side of the menu only it was marked as "relatively salty." How cute is that! I'm not making this stuff up you guys. It was in fact salty, or should I say sharp, due to the sausage. Overall I liked it more than mine, but it had the same issues I'm about to discuss below.

Ahem! I think the problem with this place is twofold. Number one: the dough. The dough has no flavor of its own, assuming you don't consider "overly floured" a flavor. Yeasty, greasy, flaky, crispy... Really, anything would be better than this powdery mass of disappointment.

I snapped this picture of a calzone baking in the brick oven on the way out. Look how cute and plump it is! (A medium was more than enough for one person, by the way. You won't feel like finishing it anyway.) But also notice its color. That, my friend, is the color of flourpaste.

Number two: the cheese. I am forced to consider that it may just be more difficult to purchase good quality cheese in Taiwan. This place doesn't use pre-sliced orange American cheese from Carrefour, but I almost wish they had... At least that stuff has a cheesy kick to it, chemical induced though it may be. I'm very unused to having consumed such large quantities of melted cheese and feeling so "ehhh" about it. It's almost frustrating, like I've been cheated somehow.

I realize this review is a little harsh, but I can't help it. My expectations were too high going in, and I came out utterly disappointed. I have no desire to go back here again. A shame, because I hear that they sell handmade liquid nitrogen ice cream on weekends.

OVERALL REVIEW: 2/5