The Pizza Locust

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.