The Pizza Locust

Never let it be said that TV is a complete wasteland. Recently, I was skimming channels when what did I see but a Food Network piece on an Arizona pizzeria. I expected it to be about Chris Bianco’s place, but I was pleasantly surprised when it was about a restaurant I’d never heard of: La Piazza al Forno, in downtown Glendale. It looked to be a wood-fired brick oven style pizza, just exactly in line with what I like, so I knew I had to to try it. It also looked like it had a lot more seating than the excellent Pizza A Metro, which is nearer my home, but only has about 10 seats and is a bit difficult to wrangle the family into.

Our first try, just a couple days after the Food Network program aired was met with frustration, there were simply too many people waiting to get in, and I had a car full of hungry kids.

Today, my second attempt was alone, and just as the restaurant opened. I’ve made it a long-standing policy to never test a pizza restaurant just as they open because they rarely seem to have the oven “right” for the first few, but this was the only opportunity I’m going to have for a few more days and I was eager to try them.

I think my long-standing policy remains a good one, and this pizza was a perfect example of why I adopted it in the first place.

Let’s come to that later, and let’s start with the good stuff.

The review pizza was a 12″ pizza with sopressata taking the place of the standard pepperoni. (When salami or sopressata are available, I’ll usually choose them over pepperoni). Service was efficient and the pizza was prepared quickly. I’m reasonably sure it was the first pizza of the day, as there was only one customer before me. The restaurant really started to crowd up around 11:30.

The pizza is cooked under a high temperature brick oven, right next to the coals, and therefore cooks very quickly. These type of pizzas (Grimaldi’s is another example) often place the cheese under the sauce in order to prevent burning. Personally, I like a bit of lightly browned cheese so I prefer cheese on top, but if the ingredients are right and the pizza well-cooked, I don’t mind either way.

The sopressata was excellent. Flavorful with a somewhat unexpected zing.

The sauce was just about perfect, somewhat tart, with plenty of flavor.

The cheese… well, here’s where the first problem occurred. Taken as a bite of cheese, the mozzarella a good, soft mozzarella. If I had to guess, I’d say it was either freshly made or of the type that is often packaged in water. This type of mozzarella typically doesn’t have a lot of flavor when eaten uncooked. That was the first problem here. The mozzarella had barely been melted and in places was still in small chunks. The cook time on the toppings wasn’t quite enough.

The crust was the other area. Again, it was cooked beautifully on top, and had the potential to be excellent, but the bottom was blackened throughout. It was so burnt in places that it was leaving charred flour residue all over the place, including on my lips, which I was still tasting (instead of pizza) after I left the restaurant. That wasn’t so good.

I was left with the impression that this could have been a great pizza, marred by the oven temperature environment not being quite right yet. My next attempt – and there will be a next attempt – will be towards the end of lunch hour rather than at the start.

In the meantime, working on the assumption that the burnt bottom wasn’t intentional, I’ll give the restaurant a strong recommendation – pending further tests.

La Piazza al Forno

5803 W Glendale Ave

Glendale, AZ 85301

(623) 847-3301

12″ sopressata pizza, $11 or $0.10 (0.097) per square inch

I returned with the whole family for a second try, this time around 1:30PM. The restaurant was mostly full and the pizzas were flying out of the oven.

My wife tried the seafood pasta (frutti de mare), my daughter the baked meat lasagna and my son and I split another sopressata pizza.

My wife reports the seafood was good and the sauce had a bit of a zing, which she liked. The lasagna, which I also sampled was very good and very heavy on the sausage. The sausage was excellent, too.

Oh course, what I really wanted to know is if the bottom of my pizza was burnt again.

It wasn’t.

It looked perfectly cooked, top and bottom, but my only complaint was that the middle was so soggy you couldn’t cut it, it just smeared apart when I touched it with a knife.

That said, without the burnt bottom of the other day and in spite of the center being soggy, this was the best tasting pizza I’ve ever had in the Phoenix metro area. It really is a fine-tasting pizza, and in particular the flavor of the sauce and the sopressata really stood out.

It’s not that the Pizza Locust has been dormant for eleven months, it’s just that the swarm hasn’t had many opportunities to go somewhere “new” lately. With that in mind, here’s the first of a few that are new or I’ve been putting off for a variety of reasons.

Looking back, one of the more surprising pizza finds I’ve had was Rock Bottom, a brewery restaurant that had a very good, if limited, selection of pizzas.

Typically, I associate brewery restaurants with patrons who are too wrapped up in their beer to really notice (or care about) the taste of the food. Since I’m not a beer drinker the appeal of such places is limited unless they have good food.

So I found myself unexpectedly having “refreshments” at the Gordon Biersch right behind the Apple Store in Santan Village, at the most extreme eastern edge of Arizona – or so it seems if you’re travelling from central Phoenix.

I had a pizza and a “homemade” root beer. (Really? Someone actually lives where they made this root beer?). The root beer was really good, the pizza… not so much.

Oddly enough there was an oddity on the menu. All of the pizzas featured mozarella and parmesan cheese except the pepperoni pizza, which listed only parmesan. Typo? In all the thousands of pizzas I’ve had and the countless pizza places around the world I’ve eaten in, I don’t recall ever seeing a pizza with only parmesan cheese.

However, for only 20 cents more you got sausage and pepperoni and mozarella, so I opted to break the zero or one-item only rule in this case. I like parmesan cheese on pizza, but I think it would be too harsh as the only cheese.

The pizza wasn’t sized on the menu but I estimated it to be a 12″ pizza and cost $11.95.

The sausage and pepperoni were both fine, but nothing special and the sauce was good, with a bit of bite to it.

The crust; however, was disappointing. It was soft and puffy and tasted more like a garlic breadstick than pizza crust. In fact, the garlic powder flavor was a bit overpowering. They’d really dusted it on.

I can’t be certain, but one could be forgiven for thinking that my pizza did only have parmesan cheese because it had that distinctive bitter taste that makes a great accent but doesn’t work so well ad the main cheese – at least not for pizza.

As such, I cannot recommend the pizza at Gordon Biersch.

Review date: 02/14/2009
Gordon Biersch
2218 East Williams Field Rd. Suite 101
Gilbert, Arizona

12″ Sausage and Pepperoni pizza – $11.95 or $0.11 (0.106) per square inch.

Not recommended, but the root beer is good.

Pizza for Valentine’s Day? Why not. This was the special from Papa John’s this year.

Sometimes, life throws you some surprises – like when you find out a friend is holding his three-year old’s birthday party in a brew pub. (He is British, so I suppose it shouldn’t be that surprising.

Last week, we reviewed Old Chicago Pizza, which happens to be owned by Rock Bottom, so I wasn’t really surprised that Rock Bottom also serves pizza. My expectation was that it would be very similar to Old Chicago’s. However, I was in the mood for pizza and their pepperoni pizza sounded interesting, so I decided to add Rock Bottom as a reviewed pizza.

It turns out the assumption that they serve something similar to Old Chicago is completely false.

Rock Bottom isn’t a proper pizza place, and they don’t make customizable pizzas, in fact, they only make four pizzas, and only in one size. However, since one of the four pizzas is an “ordinary” pepperoni pizza, it qualifies for review.

Their pepperoni pizza is described as follows:

Not one, but two layers of seasoned pepperoni with a blend of four cheeses and fresh California tomato sauce.

The size of the pizza is not documented, but it measured in at 10″.

When this pizza arrived, it was clear that it was loaded. Loaded with pepperoni and loaded with sauce. The crust was more of a Neopolitan-style, although thicker, so perhaps California-style would be more appropriate and well-cooked through. The most unique aspect of the pizza was that it was also covered with black peppercorns – presumably that’s what “seasoned pepperoni” means. Whatever the logic behind the peppercorns, it worked well. It was a good pizza.

I don’t know what the four cheeses in the cheese blend were, but they were good, with a nice complementary flavor.

The pepperoni was good, and the peppers really enhanced their flavor. They also lent the entire pizza a peppery zing. Kids might find it too spicy.

The sauce was really the star of the pizza, it was very full-bodied and flavorful. I can’t say that I could compare it to any sauce I’ve had before on a pizza. There was a hint of something familiar and long-forgotten, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

The weakest link was the crust, and it wasn’t that weak. Although the literature says it was a “hand-stretched Honey Brown Ale crust”, there really wasn’t a lot of flavor in the crust. It was thoroughly cooked, and in no way detracted from the rest of the pizza.

This pizza also had something else going for it, too: At $9.29 for a 10″ pizza, it’s one of the cheapest per square inch I’ve had for some time. In this time of insanely inflated flour prices, that’s a good thing.

I’ll also take a moment to comment on the children’s birthday party. Although you might not think of it as your first choice, it worked out fairly well. Rock Bottom’s children menu includes a build-it-yourself pizza, in which the children are brought a stretched dough, sauce, cheese and pepperoni. They make the pizzas at their table, and then they are taken away and fired in the ovens before being returned to the kids. This is what they did for the birthday party, and the kids really loved it.

There’s no play area or place to put up decorations, but the parents can get tanked and take a tour of the brewery.

Rock Bottom Restaurant & Brewery
National Chain
Review location:
14205 S 50th St.
Phoenix, AZ 85044
(480) 598-1300

10″ Pepperoni Pizza, $9.29 or $0.12 (0.118) per square inch.

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