First a note: THERE ARE TOO FREAKIN' MANY PIZZA JOINTS IN BELLEVUE, WASHINGTON, USA.
Too many and most not very good. Pagliacci is here, in Bellevue Square Shopping Center, but it's always packed and, IMHO, is the least consistent Pagliacci in the entire chain. There have been several notable failures in the past few years, Sahara Pizza foremost among 'em, but somehow crappy pizza like Garlic Jim's, the execrable Domino's, and Tony Moroni's continue to hang in there. There is absolutely NOBODY doing a small, artisan, careful pizza restaurant, (well, Topolino's but the pizzas are, with apologies for being uncharitable, not very good) so selecting a pizza in Bellevue has for several years been a search for the Lesser of Many Mediocrities.
Zeeks changes things...a bit. Zeeks is, of course, a chain, albeit a Seattle-based chain with only nine locations. I've eaten at Zeeks many times in their other shops, picky SOB that I am, because when I'm just too friggin' lazy or busy to make my own, theirs is flavorful and dependable. And, occasionally, verging on excellent. Our first visit to their new Bellevue location - mercifully off the well-beaten path of Bellevue Way and its gangs of roving, babbling trendy snots - was on a warm Sunday afternoon and the place was nearly empty. We ordered a Puget Pounder, their meat-bomb pie, and waited a very respectable eleven minutes for it to come. The server was friendly and cheerful and helped a lot with questions. And the pie turned out to be one of the best chain pizzas I've tasted in quite a while; EASILY in a league with Pagliacci and clearly better than everybody else here in this Pizza Wasteland. The marinara was spicy and assertive, the crust was chewy and VERY flavorful, and the toppings were as good as I've found at ANY pizza place in the area. The pepperoni was actually a tad spicy-hot(!), the Canadian bacon was mellow and full-flavored, and the sausage, while the weakest part of the blend, was still pretty fine pizza sausage. It was my birthday, so Judye graciously let me pig out and I ate six of the eight slices of the generous 12" pie. The only false note was when the server brought out the pizza and placed it on top of one of those annoying, pointless spiral, wrought-iron cake-stand things, a practice which absolutely screams "PRETENTIOUS!!!" I took it off and asked her to remove Sasquatch's IUD and sanity was restored.
The atmosphere was stress-free and spacious and they actually play their (generally) tasteful collection of rock classics (a genre that usually makes my teeth wobble) at audible volumes(!), a phenomenon nearly as rare as a planetary alignment. (I did, once again, for the fifty-zillionth time, have to gring my teeth through f__king "Free Bird". Won't Lynyrd Skynyrd EVER die? Please?)
All in all, for those of us who **don't** eat out in Bellevue and never taste our food at all because we're so obsessed with being seen and checking out babes, Zeeks is a pretty high-quality addition to the downtown food mix. How it got here remains a mystery (I guess the city's Dining Police, who normally sift out anything resembling well-made food, were short-handed the day the business license was granted) but I'm very glad it did. Zeeks is one of those small chains that you just pray doesn't fall victim to the "Too Big To Stay Good" syndrome. read more