The Pizza Locust

The circuitous route that lead us to Tastebud’s Pizza is doesn’t really matter for the purposes of review, suffice that we walked into Tastebud’s Pizza on Montezuma St completely without without any preconceptions of their restaurant.

For me, it brought back a wave of nostalgia from my youth and explains how Pizza Hut won the west.

Tastebud’s sits just south of Prescott’s famous Whiskey Row in a small building which bears all the hallmarks of being converted into a restaurant from something else, perhaps even an old home.

We ordered two 12″ pizzas, one cheese, one sausage.

My first bite of the sausage pizza filled my mind with memories long since forgotten. I recalled days when, back in the 1970’s my father and I traveled around the western United States. We’d pull into small towns and, in those days, most didn’t have a pizza restaurant. If they did it would be one (or occasionally both) of two things: a Pizza Hut, or a mom and pop local shop.

The Pizza Huts, while not particularly wonderful, were reliable and consistent, no matter where we were. The mom and pop shows were, more often than not, run by people who may have never tasted a decent pizza. Their pizzas would be made with the flour, cheese and other ingredients they could buy at the local Safeway or Piggly Wiggly. They almost never failed to disappoint.

In all fairness, in those days, small towns in the western US simply could not get fresh or specialty ingredients. The infrastructure wasn’t there. I’ve often thought that Pizza Hut’s aggressive expansion in these under-served markets lead to their global domination today.

Tastebud’s brought that all back to me with a single bite. It was like I was in Kallispel, Montana in 1974 all over again.

It’s not that it was awful pizza, but it was an uninspired effort. The crust was too much like plain bread, the cheese had the hint of being either (a) old or (b) synthetic. The sauce was unremarkable, but at least the sausage was good tasting.

I neglected my locust duties and didn’t record the exact cost of the pizza. Our two 12″ pizzas with two cans of soda (they didn’t appear to have fountain drinks) cost $19.65. Tax in Prescott appears to be 7.9% making the cost of the pizzas and soda about $18.21, or an average of $9.10 each. Guessing that each soda was a buck, that’s about $8.10 per pizza or $0.07 (0.0716) per square inch. (Recognizing that the cheese pizza was less than the sausage pizza, this is just an estimate.)

Not recommended

Tastebud’s Pizza
(928) 778-3340
334 S Montezuma St
Prescott, AZ 86303

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