me and the food around me. i like to eat, so listen up.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

SLAB PIZZA: i'm still not convinced

there was a discussion on my facebook page a few weeks back about slab pizza, its a little place over by BYU campus that caters to cheap BYU students. first off, i'm not a fan. at all. tho, a few friends (ernie and vegor) really like it, and while i will disagree with them on the merits of this pizza i will grant that i haven't tried everything on the menu.
in defense of my stance i will say that my criteria for a pizzeria is their cheese pizza and their pepperoni pizza. the logic i follow is pretty simple: if the cheese pizza sucks, i'll still try the pepperoni. if the pepperoni sucks, i'm done with the place. if a pizzeria can't get either one of those two pizza right, it doesn't make me want to spend time and money on anything else.
that said, slab pizza's cheese pizza sucked. so did their pepperoni. their employees also weren't wearing gloves or hairnets. strikes 1,2, and 3.
don't get me wrong, i tried really hard to like this pizza, but it was just too flavorless. the crust was bland, as was the sauce and cheese. it seemed like no thought at all went into the recipes. i felt like i could have gone to smiths and gotten a prepackaged dough mix with a jar of "pizza" sauce and some hormel pepperoni and gotten the same thing.
i will give props to them for using a brick oven, but for some reason they put a screen underneath the pizza instead of putting it right on the brick. it doesn't seem like they understand the reason for using a brick oven when they cook pizza that way. seems like everything there is kinda backwards.
granted, nicolitalia is one of the most backwards places on earth, but they get the essential things right.
i can understand going cheap on some of the ingredients, that is fine, but why be lazy about a recipe? it won't affect cost margins too much to develop a better sauce or dough recipe when the main cost on a pizza is cheese. if they spent a little extra money on decent cheese and threw a few spices into that pizza sauce it wouldn't be so bad, because at $3.75 for a quarter slice they can still make money, and have a better reputation.