| rev:text
| - We came in for dinner on a Wednesday night. Finally! Dying to eat their pie.
The restaurant is nice and roomy, with very comfortable, spacious booths, good level of softer overall lighting with slightly brighter lighting over your table to see your meal, and a casual but distinct brand of decor. Shame on me for not taking pictures! The franchise logo and cute innuendo slogans are nicely incorporated into the space and dining accoutrements. The menus are cleverly displayed under the clear tabletop layer so you can see them the moment you sit down and they're always in front of you, defended from dining disasters.
There are daily After 8 PM specials according to the day of the week, which are promotional pricing for a drink that also comes with a free Kobi 62 (basic cheese) pie. Wednesday happened to be the After 8 Red Wine so we ordered one of those. I wish I could remember exactly how many ounces there were but it was a very generous serving for $11.75. The server was super nice and asked whether we'd like to have the extra pie tabulated and made later separately to take home with us if we weren't planning to eat 3 of them during our dinner sitting. For anyone who can eat 3 of those pies in one sitting, there's a Homer Simpson-style challenge where you can get the monster $35 Furious Canucker pie for free if you can finish it in 35 minutes.
We settled on one Hedgehog and one classic Pepperoni for our dinner choices. I wanted the Hedgehog for the spicy hot pepper puree that goes with the base tomato sauce, plus the spicy salami and sausage to go with the pepperoni. Most of the pies use fresh basil, and many of them have "upgrade" versions which use fresh mozzarella in addition to (or instead of) regular. BF took the regular Pepperoni pie with regular tomato sauce, regular mozzarella and basil, as opposed to the Pepperoni Plus which adds fresh mozzarella and uses maple chili glaze instead of basil.
These pizzas are fantastic! The crust is beautifully cooked to crispy perfection in the wood oven. You can ask for how well done you want it cooked. The tomato sauce is really good - it tastes like one of your Italian relative's house made stuff (as in, made from fresh tomatoes by the bushels in the garage-production process), and the fresh basil is such an important improvement when it comes to making a pizza taste authentic.
For some of the pies, including my Hedgehog, you have a garlic aioli topping. The server asked whether I wanted that on the side or not at all, and I kinda wish I had taken one of those two options instead. I have to say, the garlic aioli did a lot more to detract from the overall delicious authenticity of the pizza, than add flavour. It was far too close to the packets of garlic sauce that taste nothing you'd ever get in a pizzeria in Italy. Also, the pizzas were just that little bit too salty, which further added to (or should I say, detracted from) the authentic Italian taste of the pizzas. Those were the only reasons I decided to rate 4 stars instead of 5, and maybe I would say it's 4.5 anyway. The wine wasn't particularly impressive either but then it's for casual pizza dinner, so it didn't really impact so much as the Western-level fast-food saltiness taste and the un-Italian tasting aioli. The only other glitch was the mineral water that arrived instead of our Sprite order. Turned out the soda fountain had some issues but nothing unforgivable in a busy restaurant. Again, the server was super nice, tried a second time, and didn't need to be asked not to add it to the bill.
I'll say 4.5 since there are extra really great details like the nice paper-lined serving tray to cut your pizza yourself with your own pizza cutter, and the selection of 4 or 5 additional condiments (including hot sauce, and a wonderfully hot and tasty pepper oil bottled in miniature Mexican beer bottles) to dip your crust in to enjoy to the last crumb.
Really looking forward to returning and enjoying other smokin' wood fired selections on the menu. By far one of the most enjoyable dining experiences in the neighbourhood, right down to the smiley on the receipt!
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)