I signed up for a Yelp account because of my experience with this restaurant. I think they deserve a star for their napkins. They provide some of the highest quality paper napkins you could ever hope to find in a restaurant. To be fair, I did a to-go order and it was ready on time and it included everything I asked for. In my book, that deserves some credit. Where things went south however, was the food. It is probably the worst Pizza I ever ate. My wife had the same reaction. What they serve are Neapolitan pizzas. I have eaten many of these from other vendors, so my issue is not with the style of the pizza. It was the ingredients. I had a pepperoni pizza and my wife had a margherita. We also ordered the crostini con prosciutto and the brick bread bites with sauce.
The Pepperoni Pizza: The biggest problem with this pizza is that the sauce tasted like old bitter tomato paste. It was completely devoid of seasoning. I was able to correct some of this by adding pizza spices from Faboni's (an Italian specialty store located in Madison, WI). The cheese blend was awkward and did not work well with the spiceless sauce. I am not really sure what they used, but it tasted like there was some sharp cheddar in the mix. The pepperonis they used were those with a more mellow flavor and not the super salty kind - which worked against it. The crust was thin as it should, but perhaps a little to thin and small slices lacked firmness. It seemed to be a bit undercooked. I am not sure that is a function of time or temperature.
The Margherita Pizza. Though the sauce on this pizza was different (they used San Mazano), it suffered from the same bitterness and lack of flavor. The crust was too thin and soggy. It did not have that freshness of flavor that you expect from a Margherita.
The Crostini con Prosciutto: They killed this dish by using far to much balsamic dressing. It completely overpowered everything. The funny thing is that there is no mention of balsamic dressing in the ingredients for this dish.
Brick Bread Bites: The oil was not fresh - that is enough to kill any dish. It also seemed to be devoid of the promised Parmesan cheese.
Location. This is not a stand-alone restaurant. It is located inside of Hoover Park (apparently, it is the world's only hooverboard amusement park). When you walk in the main entrance, you see what you think it the restaurant across the tile floor because there is a sign stating the name of the restaurant. Turns out this is the seating area only. Food is picked up and ordered at a counter closer to the door (immediately to the left) where there is no sign. If you are already in the facility, it is probably a little more obvious.
The fact that it is at this location suggests a different target market. The goal here may be to feed kids whose palates are often less discerning. They currently do not have any pictures of this facility on the website, so it was a bit of a surprise to me to learn where it was.
Staff: The staff was friendly. In fact, the did something kind of nice. When I arrived at the counter, there was a family in front of me trying to figure out what to order. I probably would have had to wait 10 minutes to reach the cashier, but someone from the seating area recognized this and walked across into the counter area to get my food so I could be on my way. The lady at the counter working with the family was doing a great job helping them with their order. She was very patient and recognized that that the children were excited to be involved in the order process. read more