At the counter you buy your slice or pie (yes, they do call it pie here, just like I prefer it). You then take a seat, & wait for one of the sweet or churly, & adorable yet grungy staff to throw your slice down like Hulk Hogan himself & holler your name, "Ali"
I promise you there is an archetype for each & every pizza staff member here. There's the introspective girl who wears the translucent large framed plastic spectacles from the 80s hint: Napoleon Dynamite or the sweaty mustached chap, thin as a rail & waiting for his shift to get over so he could play more pinball & other arcade games with his pro bono meal.
As far as the taste goes, well, it's not bad at all for being decent NYC Pizza. I tried both their Sicilian & their regular slice the plain "old school" way. Plain pizza is my usual go to pizza style. It never goes out of taste, & maintains the hallmark of true old fashioned cheese pizza. When in Rome errrrr... When in NYC, eat Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle style!
They have pies (pies are whole pizzas for all you people unversed in NYC lingua franca) & slices in various toppings ranging from the general to the more unique such as ricotta & broccoli.
Their gluten free pizza is "top of the pops" (an 80s show from the UK) from the looks of it. A customer & I got into a convo about it, & she said it was wonderful. They have salad & calzones if that's your calling, but regardless, Old School is just too cool for school.
There is a good selection of Olympia beer, root beer, & various soft drinks to wash all that pizza down whilst you play one more arcade game & look longingly & perhaps lovingly at your long forgotten favorite celebrities from the 80s (probably makes sense to anyone born pre-1979). Yes, the very table you're sitting down at is a coin operated arcade game table.
Also, there's a satirical poster of cartoons & Limburger cheese by the bathroom. Since I'm a Wisconsinite & a cheese nut, & being fully aware that it's one of the more stronger cheeses, I felt having such a poster of a strong, ripe cheese is just perfectly witty & grungy in front of the stronger odors of the bathroom! Well, the downtown in Olympia is strong & ripe from all the homelessness that prevails many a Northwestern city.
Old School pizza has stopped in time. It's as though time has come to a halt here, maybe most of Olympia even, & the clock melts away in every other place but Olympia, in a Daliesque melting clock sort of fashion, but at Old School, time just stays still. No changes. Whatsoever.
As our tastes in fashion, culture, sports icons & the like seem to change, Old School Pizza maintains the need to remember these very old school celebrities: from the TMNT - that's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles you dork (!) to King Tutanchamun, Iron Maiden, Hulk Hogan, Kitt the Trans Am car, Madonna, Tears For Fears & Bruce Lee all looking at you to toast them, & take a bow. They're forever omnipresent in our lives - atleast right here, as we take another bite & push away at the buttons on the very arcade game table that holds the pizza & beer.
Three stars for pizza quality, but one more for ambience, punk, grunginess (in the best of ways) & everything else. read more