| rev:text
| - This place makes me sad. We went here about 6 months or more ago to try it out since we read good reviews. I didn't remember much about it but we never went back. So recently we were looking on yelp for a place to go for wood fired pizza and I remembered Bella Gusto had tasty pizza but I couldn't remember why we never went back. When we walked through the door last week it all came back to me. The atmosphere is terrible. It starts when you pull into the strip mall which is in dirty, horrible condition, however I wouldn't hold that against the place if it didn't have other strikes against it. The place is just unappealing. They have this gorgeous tiled brick oven which I'm assuming came from Italy and cost a fortune. Then it's all downhill from there. It's dark, and not in a hip moody kind of way, the tables and chairs are low quality and in poor shape. They were blasting what could be categorized as bad 70's rock music which is completely ill fitting to the place. The multiple TV screens playing sports and crappy commercials, it's a downer. I'm eating a $16 pizza and watching ads for Subway. If I had to sum it up I'd say this place can't decide what it wants to be. Do they want to be a chic brick oven pizzeria? Or do they want to be a dive sports bar? You can't be both. I get that owning a restaurant is hard and bars make money, but the food and the atmosphere don't jive at Bella Gusto. Even the way the tables are set up is awkward, the place needs to be revamped. Here's the rub. The pizza is good, it's VERY good. And I am a pizza snob, I don't even hide it. I usually try to seek out real wood fired brick oven Napoletana style pizza in any town I visit. We frequent the VPN pizza restaurants in town often (to my knowledge there are only 4 in Arizona, Fat Olives, La Piazza x2 and Pomo x 4 and Vero Amore), the ones that have their recipes and ingredients certified from an Italian organization, certified to be damn tasty and to be made correctly with the proper ingredients. Well sadly Bella Gusto is really, really close to being as good as a VPN pizzeria. That says a LOT about their food. Their sauce and crust are phenomenal. However, I can't justify paying those prices, even though it's very reasonable, and sit in a dive sports bar atmosphere. When I go out for that type of pizza I'm looking for more of a date night atmosphere, I'm thinking pizza wine and unnoticeable background music not pizza, beer and sports. Now I might be biased because I'm Italian but I feel like if you're going to be a pizzeria that serves mostly pizza and mostly the more expensive Italian brick oven style pizza, then you should probably be playing Italian music or at least something more palatable for dinner than Lyndard Skynard or CCR at high volume. Like I said, they make great pizza, but they don't know what they want to be. I hope they figure it out some day because I'd definitely give them another try if the atmosphere changed.
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