The Pizza Locust

Sauce Pizza & Wine has been a restaurant that I’ve “missed” on several occasions. Although it isn’t terribly far from my home, it is in an area that I rarely pass without purpose. Even more likely, I’m usually only there when we’re dining at Pei Wei which is just a couple doors down in the same shopping complex.

Sauce wants to look like an upscale place, but when I have to order at the counter like you do at Sizzler, the illusion is quickly dispelled. Combine that with their logo, which, presumably is a splash of sauce, but looks unerringly like a bullet hole and you should get the feel for the place. Although I wasn’t able to get a good look in their oven, it did appear to be a wood or coal fired brick oven.

Sauce’s menu is simple, pizzas, salads, a few pastas, paninis and wine, but, of course, I was there for the pizza.

All pizzas are 12″. I had the pepperoni pizza for $8.50.

This pizza is thin. Probably the thinest I’ve ever seen. The crust was literally as thin as a flour tortilla, and it had an unusually bumpy texture on the bottom. It had puffed up well, but was slightly overcooked, leaving it charred in a few places. I’ll come back to the crust here in a moment.

The toppings were good. I unreservedly liked the pepperoni and cheese, and I particularly liked the sauce. As the crust was so thin, I had no trouble eating the whole pizza in one sitting.

Now, back to the crust. I like a thin crust. It’s more likely to be cooked, a bit crusty and it doesn’t usually overpower the toppings as deep dish pizza crusts do. Sauce’s crust was a different. It was so done in places that it had the consistency of a cracker, but it doesn’t taste like a cracker. It really hasn’t got a whole lot of flavor, which, in this case was fine. It complemented the other ingredients by letting them have the spotlight completely.

Only when I reached the very outer edge was the crust’s inadequacies apparent. Even now, though, I’m not sure if that’s “the usual” or due to the fact it was a bit overcooked.

My wife also had a pizza, the sausage and caramelized onion version. Her pizza, if anything, was a bit more done than mine. Later, a table near us had a pepperoni pizza and I could clearly see it wasn’t charred like ours were, and it looked very good, which leads me to think ours might have just been on the “outside” of normally cooked.

I tried a bite of the sausage and it was also good tasting, although my wife didn’t particularly care for her pizza. He complaint: The crust was just wrong and she likened it to the taste of a tortilla. While I don’t agree that it tasted like a tortilla, the pizzas certainly had a physical resemblance to cheese crisps.

If thin crust is your game, I’m going to recommend Sauce. I’m certainly going to try them again in the near future for a second round.

Sauce
742 E. Glendale
Phoenix, AZ
(602)216-2400

Cost: 12″ Pepperoni pizza, $8.50. Cost Per Square inch: $0.08 (0.0751)

Recommended. (Thin crust fans only)

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