Pizza is subjective. I’ll be the first to admit that.
One person’s ultimate pizza is another man’s greasy cardboard. Some days when I’m eating a review pizza, I think, “no one could like this”.
Other days I think, “this isn’t my cup of tea, but I could see how someone else could love it.” And so it was while I was eating at Pino’s Pizza Al Centro.
Right off the bat, I’m not inclined to return, but I’ll try to be as detailed as I can in this review to let you decide as you see fit.
I generally see pizza lovers falling into two major camps: Foundationers and Topping Heads. I’m a Foundationer.
A Foundationer is not a crackpot religion, but a pizza philosophical position. In short, a crust failure is a total pizza failure.
(While it isn’t a crackpot religion, if anyone would like it to be one, just send me money and I think something can be arranged. Similarly, we are looking for someone to write a wikipedia article on this philosophical movement.)
Meanwhile, Topping Heads think everything above the sauce is the key to a masterful pizza. They’re just plain wrong, but I have to say that to keep my membership up in the Foundationers.
Keep all that in mind as we move along in this review.
Pino’s has been just off Central on Thomas for I don’t know how long. I’ve been passing it on my way home for as long as I can remember although I won’t go so far as to say It’s been there for the full 12 years I’ve been driving home that way.
It’s never open when I pass it. For the longest time, I thought it was out of business. In fact, it’s only open weekdays between 10 AM and 2 PM and again from 5 PM to 8 PM and I’m almost never driving that way during those times.
Today I made the effort to get there during lunch hour. I was expecting them to only have a couple small tables (looking through the front window gives the impression of a cramped space and no dining area), but actually they have a good-sized dining room with 20 or more tables.
Even though I ate an early lunch, it was quite busy.
They have several pizzas in a serving area for pizza by-the-slice, although I did notice that the crowds seemed more inclined towards have pastas and sandwiches rather than pizza.
My pizza was a 10″ (their smallest) pepperoni. It looked really good when served up but it did not, for me, live up to the promise of its appearance.
Starting from the top:
- I disliked the pepperoni. Pepperoni generally falls in one of three categories,
- flavorless – self explanatory
- smoky – some pepperonis have an almost summer-sausage, smoky, country, bitter flavor. More like something I’d expect from Knickerson Farms than an Italian Deli
- pepperoni-flavored. I can’t describe this one, but this is the flavorful, not smoky flavor that makes a pepperoni that I can just eat cut right off the stick.
Unfortunately, this was the bitterest, most smoky flavored pepperoni I’d tasted in a long time. That, in itself, is not a show-stopper, there’s always Italian sausage as a fallback.
- Cheese. The cheese was good, but there was loads too much on the pizza. It was awash in melted cheese. They certainly did not skimp on cheese (or pepperoni, for that matter). Too much cheese creates a different problem, which we’ll get to in a bit.
- Sauce. Good. Tasty. No complaints.
- Crust. Oh, this is really where the problem lies. The outer edge was cooked but had little flavor (unless you like the flavor of flour). There was one crunchy spot which tasted very similar to those dried Italian breadsticks they used to serve in a restaurants before they discovered people liked fresh ones.
The inside portion of the crust was raw. “Raw” in this case meaning “wet dough”. This is exactly what happens when you put too much cheese (or other toppings) on pizza. The bottom browns up nice, but the top of the crust remains uncooked.
I took a picture of it for demonstration purposes, but my cell phone camera has no macro and the picture was not clear enough to post. I was able to measure it though. There was a thin layer of cooked crust on the bottom and 3 times as much uncooked dough sitting on top of that. If you figure that the cooked crust will have risen, that’s really a lot more 75% uncooked.
As a Foundationist, the uncooked crust is inexcusable, and yet I know many people who wouldn’t think twice about eating a pizza with double or triple cheese on it.
If that’s you, then this pizza might be for you, but if a well-prepared crust reigns supreme in your book, give this one a miss.
10″ Pepperoni Pizza, $6.95 = $0.09 (0.088) per square inch
Conclusion: Topping Heads Only (But you might really like this one.)
Pino’s Pizza Al Centro
139 W Thomas
Phoenix, AZ
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