The Pizza Locust

Sometimes fate steps in and tosses you an unexpected pizza and sometimes a good laugh with it, too.

The Locust family was out on the Chandler side of town for a picnic, but a severe miscommunication between the hosts and the guests meant that for the first 90 minutes the guests were on the wrong side of the park wondering where the hosts were.

The hosts had brought pizza from Costco but as time passed it had congealed into a cold, inedible mess. Meanwhile as we waited for our missing hosts, we hatched a plan to go get food.

What was nearby? We were a long way from our usual stomping grounds A quick check of Google Maps on the iPhone and, along with the usual suspects, we discovered that Floridino’s, a family pizza and pasta place was less than half a mile away.

I remembered passing Floridino’s once before and making a note to come back and try it. Fate seemed to be demanding me to try it tonight.

At 7:00pm it was packed but the place is quite large and we managed to get in.

Before I review the food, I have a couple observations about the place. It has a certain air of casual carelessness to it.

People coming in seemed to have to negotiate to get a table. Rather than take them to a table the host more sort of pointed them in the general direction he wanted them to go. Often the guests would notice a table they liked better and the host would say something like, “oh, I didn’t see that one” but he’d still try to get them to find their own table elsewhere in the restaurant.

The have signs up directing people to their website, but when I went there on 9/26/2009 it was obvious that they couldn’t bother to do their site up. It said, and I’ve cut and pasted this right from their main page “…Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.” This, for those not familiar, is gibberish used to fill space in Microsoft templates.

The picture of a skyscraper, not something you often associate with Chandler, screamed of placeholder artwork, too.

You would think that if they went to the trouble of actually advertising their website that they’d at least finish it first.

They also suggest you follow them on Twitter but give their handle as @dillysdeliaz. A quick check shows that to be tweets only about a place called (are you ready for this?) Dillys Deli.

I found a Twitter handle for @floridinos and it appears to be this restaurant but there are no tweets.

Slack. That’s my only conclusion.

Still, my hopes were high, the restaurant was obviously popular, the calzones that kept passing looked great and, having just escaped having to eat cold Costco pizza I was willing to be easily impressed.

I had a 10″ pepperoni pizza. Mrs Locust had lasagna and the junior swarm had a salad and a slice of my pizza.

The first worrying sign was the salad which was served in one of those disposible plastic trays used to keep salads “fresh” in the refrigerator. That didn’t really make me think the food was fresh.

Mrs. Locust’s lasagna was, as she put it, “…the first time I ever wished there were more noodles in lasagna. The sauce was too strong and there was too much meat.”

My pizza looked fine and was nicely cooked but by the time I’d finished my first piece I was laughing.

Why? Well let me digress for a moment.

As you might imagine I eat a fair amount of pizza. Like most people I don’t get to go to the best restaurants all the time nor do I get the opportunity to constantly be trying new places.

If you eat enough pizza in enough different places you will learn to detect the taste of certain pizzas. Typically these are pizzas made using industrially produced dough, sauce and cheese. Costco pizza is the archetype of this pizza. They use food services to supply their materials and they make them along very precise measurements. It’s consistent, passable but wholy uninspired.

Considering I had just escaped eating Costco pizza, imagine the irony that Floridino’s had just served me a pizza almost indistinguishable from a Costco pizza. It was at least very fresh and reasonably inexpensive.

There’s really nothing more to say about it.

10″ pepperoni $7.50 or $0.10 (0.095) per square inch

Conclusion – I cannot recommend Floridino’s.

Floridino’s
590 N. Alma School Rd.
Chandler, AZ 85224
(480) 812-8433

Update: 9/28/2009
I need to make a disclosure in all fairness. I posted this entry from my phone.

When I got home I went back to Floridino’s website and the items I mentioned seemed to be corrected.

I doubted that they read my review and promptly fixed the site so I checked it again on my iPhone. Result: the weirdness was back (picture attached) so obviously the page probably appears normal to them and most of their visitors. It’s just when you branch into the world of alternate web browsers that things go amiss. Therefore it’s understandable that they might miss it and not realize something was wrong.