Quality Shop!

And now I’ve delved into gas station pizza.  But you guys?  Rules are for chumps.  Portland’s best pizza may not play by the rules.  I needed a snack and some coffee, so I took a break at work and delved into a pizza slice on the side of the road.  This shop is a “Quality” shop, so I was convinced of its worth. 

Smell : Really good, nice, overpowering tomato smell.  Solid.  3.7/5

Appearance : Pretty good!  The cheese pockets were browned in a nice way that gave the appearance of hamburger or something.  Again, not shabby-looking.  3.5/5

Cheese: Didn’t really have the necessary stringy bite, but a nice enough flavor.  3.2/5

Crust:  Ellios/Cafeteria crust.  Too sweet and sugary.  But the levels of thickness were pretty much on.  2/5

Sauce: The sauce was sugary and ketchup-y.  Bad score all around.  I award this sauce no points, and may good have mercy on it’s soul.

Overall experience:  Alright, this is a brief one.  Really, I wasn’t going to grade gas station pizza, but I should expand my repertoire.  Most importantly, it was cold, I was hungry, and a review would justify the 3.44 I spent on it.  But yeah, folks, we probably shouldn’t eat pizza at gas stations.  But we got through it together, and that’s what matters.  So I’m going to give it 1.5 for overall experience.  It gets extra points for structurally being exactly like pizza should be, looking exactly like pizza should look, and smelling exactly like pizza should smell.  But everything else was wrong.

I am so annoyed that I have to do math to prove that this was not that great a pizza.  But I should at least play by those rules.  Okay, here goes.  An average of the individual components bring us to 2.4, plus the overall experience brings it up to 3.9.  Now that you have a number, you know that this is not that great of a pizza.

Pie In The Sky!

Pie In The Sky will receive an extra .1 in the final analysis as a result of it being named after my favorite labor anthem.  I’m sorry.  Do you want objectivity?  Write ya own blog.  Pie In The Sky is in the perfect place, right above the public market house.  Downstairs you can buy your cheese, beer and maybe some vegetables or chocolate, and then you get to go upstairs and get all the different important kinds of prepared food: Soup, Pizza, Burritos and some Coffee/Pastry situation.  It’s the perfect fucking place for Sundays.  Maybe I have been to public market house a million times and never actually gotten pizza there?  Maybe that is the case?  Honestly, I walk in all of the time starving and hungry, and the smell is always so fucking fantastic, but if it’s hot out, I eat a burrito and if it’s cold out, I get soup.  Therefore, on a very lukewarm day, Nancy and Elliot went out for Pie In The Sky.

Smell : The smell has always impressed me.  There is something so appetizing about the public market house, and this amazing smell somehow dominates all of the other delicious foods that are coming out of it.  Jolly good show, pizza.  5/5

Appearance : The appearance, however, is a different story.  Something about it seems…small, maybe shriveled.  There is no objective reason for the use of the term “shriveled”, it’s just what I think of when I see their pizza.   Maybe because it is small slices with small toppings but an overbearingly large crust.  Anyway, 2/5.

Cheese: Ok.  Not as much flavor as I like.  The consistency is a nice stringiness, with *some*degree of floppiness.  However, that is the fault of crust and not the cheese.  So I cannot fault the cheese (Wow.  That was a beautiful sentence). 2.5/5

Crust:  Overdoing it on the crust.  Look, pizzas, I don’t know why it’s so fucking difficult to strike a perfect .5/.5/1 balance on your pizza.  It’s 25% cheese, 25% sauce and 50% crust, not 75% crust with some cheese and sauce on top. It’s time to just get with the program.  Now, I know this is the case because Pie In The Sky is a side project of Big Sky Bread company.  They are just showing off their awesome and yummy and fresh baking techniques.  And yeah, that’s yummy.  But here are my problems with their crust.  1) It’s too doughy.  It’s a chewy and bouncy bite take takes over your mouth, as opposed to a nice, doughy contrast to balance out flavorful cheese and sauce.  2) It’s not herb-y enough.  The dough really showcases the quality of the flour and oils they use, but it’s a fucking pizza, guys, not an Artisanal Bread Showcase.  Give me some basil or black pepper.  3) The heavy emphasis on bread works against in the pizza not only in terms of overpowering flavor, but a structurally doughy crust leads to a lot of problems including, but not limited to: cheese floppiness, sauce drippings and overall pizza imbalance. I’m torn for the score.  Part of me wants to give it a 3 because the dough itself is quite yummy.  Another part of me wants to give it a 2, because it’s inappropriate in this context and is what is really dragging the pizza down.  So I guess I have to concede to a 2.5/5

Sauce: I think the sauce is what drives the wonderful smell home.  It’s a great sauce, and I wish they showcased it more instead of the crust.  It’s nice, I think I detected hints of balsamic, very round while remaining bright and appetizing, savory and succulent and delicious.  It’s up there with Bonobo for sauce, although not quite at that caliber.  I’ve giving it a nice 4.7.  That feels right.

Overall experience:  For the overall experience, you have to consider the smell.  You walk into Public Market House and, if you are starving, will be so enticed by that smell, and the pizza, as a whole, will not disappoint.  It has its flaws, but when you are hungry, the minute analysis goes out the window.  When me and Elliot were eating it, we both said “Hmm, not great”.  But in retrospect, ya know, it kind of was pretty good, just not when held up under the microscope.  So, don’t *not* eat at Pie In The Sky, especially if you are a labor activist.  I give the whole experience a pretty 3.2. 

So, with an average of individual components coming in at a decent 3.3, and the whole experience ranging 3.2, this adds up to a 6.5.  Higher end of adequate.  I would still not drop the “pretty” from the “pretty good” of this pizza, but the smell and sauce really drives it home.