Boba pizza fascinates and repulses

Have you ever seen those pictures of cursed pizza skulking around the internet? Of course, there’s pineapple on pizza. But scroll down just a bit and you’ll find Tide Pods on pizza, corn dogs (with the wooden stick still inside) on pizza, candy corn on pizza and fried eggs on pizza. You name it, it’s probably been put on a pizza.

The latest innovation in cursed pizza, though, is not adorned with potentially harmful objects like half-liquefied Tide Pods and burnt corn dog sticks. Rather, this cursed pizza has a topping that is extremely popular and actually quite delicious — when in other culinary creations. Yep, that’s right. The newest cursed pizza is boba pizza.

The most famous photo of boba pizza comes from an August post by the Instagrammer @nini_food0822. She describes the dessert as being in perfect harmony with the cheese and both salty and sweet. The photo was taken at Foodie Star, a restaurant in southwestern Taiwan’s Chiayi City that sells the pizza for the equivalent of $4.50 USD.

With a thin, perfectly browned and thin crispy crust that curls up at the edges, the dish looks like any other gourmet pizza. But upon a second glance, you realize that the gleaming black spheres baked into the warm cheese are not olives or some other mysterious otherworldly pizza-belonging deliciousness — they’re boba.

Somehow, the boba in the photo appears to have survived the high baking temperature and is only just softened enough to stick to each other. Though some pearls have partially melted into the cheese, most retain their classic ball shape.

Considering the beloved status on boba on campus, student opinion on this strange invention appears to be mixed. If given the opportunity to try boba pizza, senior Janelle Jin said she would pass on the boba pizza and would rather stick to normal tea drinks and pizzas. On the other hand, sophomore Wilson Fung, a fellow boba aficionado, said he would be “down to try it.”

“We have many weird foods now, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it tasted OK,” he said.

Unfortunately for Fung, Foodie Star appears to be the only currently known peddler of pizzas crowned with boba. If you would like to try the fantastical combination of tapioca pearls, melty cheese and crispy crust, you’ll have to buy a plane ticket (or swim, if fresh saltwater is also your thing) to Taiwan. And don’t come back!