The Unvegan

Though LA still doesn’t have it’s own style of pizza, I keep finding more and more places that attempt to create a sort of New York style pizza. My buddy recently brought me to Tomato Pie Pizza Joint in Silver Lake. At first I was frightened by any restaurant that would use the name of a vegetable in their name. Would every pizza be loaded with tomatoes? Would this actually be a pizza place or just a place that baked pies made with tomatoes? Did my friend even know who he was eating with? What’s the meaning of life? All these questions and more flooded my brain, but when I walked into the joint and the kind of pizza they had to offer, my questions and most of my fears washed away.

Tomato Pie just sells good old-fashioned pizza by the slice. You can order whole pizzas, but I decided to try out a couple different slices. The first one that I had to get was pepperoni and then I got a little bit crazy. I found they had a buffalo chicken pizza that looked 90% awesome. I say 90% because rather than spreading the bleu cheese around each slice, each one had a dollop of the dressing just chilling in the middle of the slice. I hoped it wouldn’t have an adverse affect on my slice and ordered two slices and a drink for a total of six bucks.

They tossed my slices in the over for a few minutes and then they were ready for eating. I started with the pepperoni, which tasted great. The ‘ronis were well-distributed on the pizza and the mix of cheese, sauce and crust tasted great. Then I move onto the buffalo chicken pizza. The dollop of bleu cheese still bothered me and I wondered if I was supposed to spread it around myself. I chose not to and ate it as it was. Just like the pepperoni, the buffalo chicken was delicious. They put the perfect amount of chicken and buffalo sauce on it so it didn’t too much like buffalo wings or too much like pizza. Somehow they found the perfect medium of these two great foods. Except for that bleu cheese. When I reached that dollop in the middle and ate it, it made me realize how much better the pizza would have been if that dressing was spread all over or came on the side for dipping. As it was, any dipping would have had to bend the laws of physics.

So for a good 90% of my dinner, I was one happy man. All I needed was a little tweak to the buffalo chicken and this joint would have gone from a great pizza place to an awesome one.