The Pizza Locust

Picazzo’s recently came in #9 on the City Guide best pizza.

Pizza Week ‘07 concludes with a trip to their Scottsdale location.

It was a long and circuitous trip that led up to Picazzo’s for pizza this evening. We had planned on eating elsewhere but circumstances forced us to change our plans after we’d already left the house. I knew there were one or two pizza restaurants on my short list in north Scottsdale and we literally drove up and down the streets until we came across one or gave up.

We choose Benihana’s as the point where we’d give up and forgo the final pizza of pizza week and turn around and find someplace else to eat. When we reached Benihana’s we discovered that Picazzo’s is in the same shopping center. It must have been destiny.

There are a dozen restaurants in the center, Picazzo’s was one of the busiest, but we had no trouble getting a table.

I ordered a small sausage pizza, my wife ordered a Classic Margherita. Pizza sizes were not stated on the menu, but my pizza was measured at just slightly under 10″.

It took a fairly long time to get our pizza and while we waited we looked longingly at the pizzas on the other tables. They were beautiful to behold. Likewise, when our pizzas arrived they were very good looking. Unfortunately, they weren’t as good tasting as they looked.

My first observation was that the “homemade italian sausage”, which cost $2.00 extra, was pretty thin on the ground. (Picazzo’s charges different rates for different toppings. On the small pizza, most veggie toppings cost $1.50. Most of the meats cost $2.00 and some items, like shrimp, cost $3.00.

The second observation was that they had taken the liberty of putting grated parmesan cheese on top of the pizza. While I sometimes use parmesan on pizza (as well as red pepper), I like to taste the pizza first to decide if it warrants it or not. Then, if so, I like to control the amount. In this case, the parmesan was strong and there was too much on there.

However, I’m getting things out of order. Let’s start at the bottom,

The crust, while looking absolutely like it was going to be wonderful, was too soft and more like bread than a crust. With each bite, though, I was sure that when I reached that golden outer edge it was going to be great. It wasn’t. It wasn’t particularly flavorful.

The sauce was too sweet and the mozzarella was overpowered by the parmesan.

That leaves us with the sausage. 40+ years of eating pizza with sausage and somehow, twice in one week, I eat at two places with “homemade” italian sausage that tastes kind of unpleasant. The sausage at Nello’s was inedible. This wasn’t that bad, but while this sausage also had that same, odd flavor, it also had the “normal” taste of italian sausage mixed in. That made it not as bad, but still not something I’d ask for again.

My wife tried a piece of the sausage (I hadn’t discussed my opinion with here, yet) and she immediately complained it had a funny flavor. She couldn’t describe it in English but explained in Chinese she’d call it chou, as in chou dofu or, literally stinky tofu. Inasmuch as comparing an odor to a flavor is pretty subjective, it did seem to have a certain ring of truth to it. It tasted sort of stinky.

The pizza was also at the expensive end of the scale at $0.13 per square inch.

Nothing (except the sausage) was particularly bad about this pizza, so I’m going to cop out and give it a neutral rating. I could see how some people might be wild about it and I suspect that a more complex pizza – that is, one with more toppings – might work better with this particular crust, sauce and cheese combination.

I won’t be going back, but I think this is one that others should judge for themselves. They’re obviously quite popular for some reason.

Picazzo’s Gourmet Pizza & Salads
7325 Frank Lloyd Wright
(Scottsdale Promenade)
Scottsdale, AZ
(480) 990-2212

10″ Sausage Pizza, $10 = $0.13 (0.1273) per square inch

Conclusion: Neutral. (Judge for yourself, but I might suggest skipping the sausage.)

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