Soar Out Your Zone with Fly Pizza's Inventive Pizzas

Ahead of this year's Pizza Cup and Festival, we are serving up bite-sized details about this year's participants in a series we call Pizza Mania. Today we bring you Korean pie makers Fly Pizza.

If the thousands of five-star reviews on Dianping of both of Fly Pizza's locations in Wangjing and Sanlitun are anything to go by, those who haven't tried this trendy Korean eatery yet might be missing a trick.

Fly Pizza specializes in Korean-style pizza, a world apart from more familiar styles such as Neapolitan or Chicago deep dish. Available with a choice of thick or thin base, unlike many Italian pizzas, Fly Pizza's pies cut back on the tomato sauce and are often finished with slightly sweeter sauces such as ranch dressing. Cheese is stringy and plentiful (last year Fly Pizza owner Taek Chong stated that they use semi-hard mozzarella cheese on their pizzas).

Although Fly Pizza does offer a standard margherita, their most popular pizzas are more creative, topped with sweet potato (pictured in the lead image) or bulgogi beef (a traditional Korean marinated beef barbecue dish). We tried the bulgogi version when Fly Pizza opened their Sanlitun location over a year ago and the flavor really works – imagine a slightly sweeter steak pizza. Over in South Korea, pizza joints have long been renowned for their, let's say, flexible attitude to pizza toppings. In a 2015 article on RoadsandKingdoms.com entitled "The Weird and Wonderful World of Korean Pizza," author and journalist David Tudor tells Annette Ekin that the "compressed modernity" and rapid late twentieth-century development Korea experienced has left people hungry for new ideas and experiences. Something similar could very much be said of China, which might explain the popularity of Korean pizza joints in Beijing.

Bargain hunters (or those who'll take any excuse to scoff a pizza) will want to check out Fly Pizza's current offers on Dianping. At their Sanlitun SOHO branch, pay through the Dianping app and get 10 percent off your total bill, available 11am-10.30pm, seven days a week. Alternatively, purchase a value set meal, such as the meal for four with a 14-inch pizza, a portion of fried chicken, a salad, and a bottle of Coke or Sprite for RMB 195 (a saving of RMB 57).

Did that whet your appetite? Then click here to continue nibbling all of our tasty Pizza Mania coverage.

The Beijinger's 2016 Pizza Cup and Festival is just around the corner. The celebration kicked off last week with Pies for the People. Get special deals from various pizza parlors around town. Click here for more details.

In addition, tickets are now on sale for our October 15-16 Pizza Fest at the Zaha Hadid-designed Wangjing SOHO. Tickets are limited so buy ahead to make sure you don't miss out! Click here to purchase.