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.

Slainte!

Alright, I started cheating and eating pizza that wasn’t on the original list.  Mr. John Scribner is going to kill me for inconsistency.  But anyway, Bill and I went to go see Drive, and in Drive there’s an Italian sub shop, and in the Italian sub shop there is a specials board, and for a split second, the camera has the specials board in the background, and for a brief millisecond in cinema history, the words “Daily Special: Jalapeno Poppers” popped up in the corner for the screen.  So obviously, that got me and Bill craving some jalapeno poppers (duh, wouldn’t you?).  So after the movie, we decided to get a beer and some jalapeno poppers and we went to Slainte.  But Slainte doesn’t have jalapeno poppers?  But they do have jalapeno-mushroom pizza.  Never one to miss an opportunity, I ordered a half-cheese, half jalapeno-mushroom pizza for us, and thus could count that $21 dollar investment in fancy beer and pizza as tax-deductable for my pizza blog (that’s how being a grown-up works, right?  Things get tax-deductable for unexplained reasons?)

Smell : I didn’t smell anything.  I was talking about Drive and drinking beer with Bill.  It’s also a bar.  It’s hard to smell things with a bar.  I tried to stick my nose up to it to get a good whiff, but the old man at the end of the bar kept distracting me by listing off all the Alfred Hitchcock movies we should see and also what makes them brilliant (did you guys know that the crop-duster scene in North By Northwest is, like, really clever?).  I really couldn’t get a gauge on smell – there was a spicy sauceness real up close, but that’s it.  2.1/5

Appearance : Eh.  The pizza itself was a personal pan pizza, and those are always really difficult to make look appetizing.  The overemphasis on crust was again, a huge problem.  It looked like dough with just some stuff on it, as opposed to pizza. 1.9/5

Cheese: Very low on cheese.  I was really disappointed.  And what cheese was there was certainly not the best cheese in town.  1.7/5

Crust:  Dear Apparently All The Pizza In Portland : Crust is not all there is to a good pizza.  I don’t know how many more times I can talk about this with you.  Stop making big piles of dough and putting a little sauce and cheese on top and calling it a pizza.  That’s dumb.  You’re dumb.  I want to eat good pizza again.  Love, Nancy.  This crust gets 1.5/5

Sauce: Nope, not enough sauce either.  The entire time I was eating it, I was disappointed.  Very, very sparse sauce.  Unfortunately, I have to put Sam’s and Slainte on the same pedestal, but guys, I have zero to say about the sauce.  1/5

Overall experience:  Yeah, Slainte’s a bar, but they are a classy bar, and they serve classy food.  Their mushroom soup is one of the few dishes in Portland that never ceases to make me happy.  When I used to work on Congress and I could wiggle out of work early enough to see open mic night, it used to make me so happy to split a mushroom soup with my friends finish it off with PBRs.  But those are memories of yesteracouplemonthsago.  Suffice to say, that with a soup that is good enough to earn a permanent spot in my memory, we need to hold Slainte to a better standard.  And considering that…guys, this was one of the worst pizzas.  Like, it was really good as a spoon for nice broiled jalapenos and chewy shitake mushrooms, but this blog ain’t about shitake mushrooms.  It’s about good.  cheese.  pizza, the likes of which I have not eaten in months.  As for overall experience…yeah, I was having a good time, sipping down beers and discussing a movie I just went to go see with my best friend…but guys, the pizza added nothing to the equation.  NOTHING.  2 for overall evaluation.

Well, we all learned a very important lesson.  Let’s not eat pizza at Slainte.  With a 1.4 average of individual components bringing it up to a 3.4, this beats Leonardo’s by a long-shot for worst pizza yet.  Sad face, sad face, sad face.  I do like Slainte as a bar, and again, please frequent and purchase their mushroom soup.  But nope.  Worst pizza yet.  Sorry, folks.

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.