Pizza week can also be a time of desperation and despair.

My pizza week had been all planned out, but a change in my work schedule today resulted in my being unable to review the pizza I wanted. I had to shift my plan to have pizza for dinner, but my wife had planned an elaborate meal.

I thought certain that I was going to miss my goal of pizza everyday this week. And then, on the drive home, a shining ray of mediocrity hit me: Peter Piper Pizza. If I’m not mistaken, they’re a locally grown chain that was expanded outside of Phoenix, even outside the US.

How do they do it? The same way McDonald’s sells hamburgers: they pitch to the kids.

I remember quite clearly some 30 years ago when I lived in Oracle, a small town outside of Tucson. We used to get TV reception from Phoenix, but we never went there. I’d see commercials for restaurants and stores that I thought I’d never eat in.

One of those was Peter Piper Pizza. They used to have a spokesman named Tony – a middle-aged, pot-bellied guy in a chef’s hat, standing at a counter, working a big lump of dough.

He’d say things like, “Why does pizza cost so much? It’s just some dough with some cheese on it?”

It’s just that attitude that accounts for the results of a typical Peter Piper Pizza.

What always really get my attention about those commercials was that Tony had a bit of speech problem. When he got animated and spoke out about the injustices of high-priced pizza, he kept visibly spitting in that big lump of dough he was working.

I know it was prop dough, and he wasn’t really the cook, but come on, people! That’s just gross.

I’ve scoffed at a lot of Peter Piper Pizzas over the years, but today was the first time I really tried to analyze one. (Hey, I take my pizza reviews seriously) Here goes:

There’s nothing wrong with this pizza that a good crust transplant couldn’t cure.

Their crust is just not good. It’s dry and has a consistency that is frequently compared to cardboard or dried play-doh. Those comparisons aren’t fair. I can’t think of anything to compare it to. It’s a bread, it’s not quite a cracker, it’s not quite a crusty bread stick. I just don’t know what it is and I spent a lot of time thinking about it today. (I was up till 3:00 AM last night/this morning, so it was easy for my mind to wax philosophical.)

It’s just not a proper pizza dough, and that’s the point where always I’ve dismissed it. In fact, there really wasn’t anything wrong with the rest of it. The toppings and cheese are unexciting, but passable. The blame all comes back to the crust.

How do they stay in business? It’s CHEAP, and most people don’t care what their pizza tastes like.

Cost: 7″ Pepperoni pizza, $2.49! Cost per square inch = $0.06 (0.647)

Conclusion: I can’t recommend the pizza, but they’ve got games for the kids and it’s a cheap way to feed ‘em

Peter Piper Pizza has various locations

Review pizza came from

3403 N 7th Ave
Phoenix, AZ

Technorati Tags: Blog, Food, Pizza, Pizza Week, Restaurant, Review

Pizza Week is a time of joy and forgiveness.

And it is the spirit of forgiveness that I returned to Rosati’s for lunch.

As you probably don’t recall in a previous entry, (No Good Deed Ever Goes Unpunished, July, 2005) Rosati’s by my office seriously botched up our order and did a very poor job of trying to keep a customer.

Despite the fact that they’ve served me some of the best pizzas I’ve ever had, I haven’t been back for 8 months.

I’d like to say it was the spirits of Pizza Week (Past, Present & Future) that brought me back to Rosati’s, but it wasn’t. They called my wife, unsolicited, last week and offered her a free pizza. My guess is that they’d noticed she hadn’t ordered in a long time and were trying to lure customers back. (Notice to merchants: keeping a good repeat customer is better than scrambling for new ones.)

The ploy worked.

I’ve had their stuffed crust pizzas, which I really like, and I had their thin or “original” crust, which I wasn’t as crazy about. Their thin crust is wafer thin and, although I like thin crust pizzas, for some reason Rosati’s just didn’t click for me.

I consider both stuffed pizzas and wafer thin pizzas to be out of the range of a “normal” pizza, so when given a choice of multiple types, I will generally try to review the crust most like the “typical” thickness.

For this pizza, I had a 12″ “double-dough” pepperoni pizza. Double-dough turns out to be about twice as thick as the thin crust, and just about the right thickness.

Normally, I eat the pizza on location, but Rosati’s, like many a pizza place these days, caters to delivery and take-out. The near proximity to my office made for only a 4 minute delay from door to table, and it was still piping hot.

This was an excellent pizza. The only negative was that the crust around the outer edge was a bit dry and floury, as if the dough didn’t have quite enough water in it. There was an unusual horizontal layer in the crust, which leads me to believe the double-dough is, in fact, two thin crusts cooked together, which explain a bit of the dryness.

The pepperoni was good and hidden under the cheese, but there was plenty of it. Likewise the cheese was good.

I think I might have finally figured out what, in particular, makes me like Rosati’s pizza: It’s the sauce. It’s, without doubt the best tasting sauce I’ve had and it really adds a lot to the flavor of the pizza.

Incidentally, the staff and crew were a lot friendlier and efficient.

Cost: 12″ (Double-dough) pepperoni, $10.95, cost per square inch = $0.10 (0.097)

Conclusion: Recommended

various locations around the valley

Review pizza came from
Rosati’s of Arcadia
4041 E Thomas
Phoenix, AZ

Technorati Tags: Blog, Food, Pizza, Pizza Week, Restaurant, Review