As a simple neighborhood pizza joint, they're pretty good. No complaints about their pizza, though it doesn't stand out from the crowd. If I were in the area and craving a slice, I'd stop in for one.
However last night I made the mistake of treating them as a sit-down restaurant. We had gotten one of those Restaurant.com gift certificates and figured we'd eat in and save a few bucks on a nice dinner. (For future reference, restaurant.com gift cards tend to only be accepted by mediocre restaurants)
Overall I got the feeling that sit-down dining is not really what they specialize in here. It's an afterthought at most.
The server was definitely not accustomed to dinner service. Plates were never cleared until we had accumulated a large stack and asked her to remove them (and even then, she was reluctant). Silverware was forgotten for dinner and then for dessert. And last but definitely not least, all of our drinks were served in styrofoam cups with lids and straws! These are just a few examples of how service works here. It's a pizza joint pretending to be an Italian restaurant.
As for the food... meh. You can do so much better than this.
The Italian wedding soup was as bland as it gets. The meatballs were tiny, stiff, and perfectly round like the frozen kind that you microwave when you don't have time to cook actual meatballs. Shame. I doubt this soup was made on-site, unless you count putting a bag in the warming bin.
The alfredo sauce was a homogeneous white goo with no texture and little flavor; I'm 100% certain that it came out of a jar, and a cheap one at that. The chicken and pasta were decent, at least, but they deserved better sauce.
The eggplant parmigiana was actually not so bad. The sauce may have been made on-site, but I'm skeptical. At least it was better than the alfredo.
We had to get dessert to meet the minimum to use our certificate, so we ordered cannoli and tiramisu. The cannoli were okay, but very obviously not fresh. The server even brought the tiramisu to the table frozen! I politely told her this, and her reply as she turned away was "I don't cook the food" (a surprisingly defensive reply, considering that I really was being friendly to her).
She brought it back to the kitchen for a minute or two and then explained to me, as if I had made an incomprehensible strange request, "This is actually ice cream, but we microwaved it for you."
No, you sweet misguided child. It was not ice cream. After it was warmed up, it was a very freezerburnt factory-made tiramisu. Not a puddle of melted tiramisu-flavored ice cream.
So that was weird and a little disturbing. I wonder how long it was sitting in the back of the freezer? Long enough that nobody in the kitchen had served it recently enough to even know what it is!
So overall I think I could summarize my dining experience by saying simply "Order pizza and sandwiches and NOTHING ELSE EVER". read more