The Unvegan

In an attempt to try out some new pizza while at the girlfriend’s place, we looked into a little place in West LA called Brooklyn Pizza. Knowing that we were not actually in Brooklyn, I thought this might have been some sort of a misnomer. But misnomer it was not. Instead, it seemed as though they were trying to create the sort of pizza that you could get in Brooklyn and seemed very excited to tell us over the phone that their tomatoes and cheese came from New York. This seemed nice, but are the cheese and tomatoes really the things people love about New York pizza? I thought it was the dough, but perhaps I am wrong. Nonetheless, I checked out the menu and found their Double Pepperoni looked appealing.

Excited again, the guy on the phone said that there Double Pepperoni wasn’t simply extra pepperoni, but two different kinds of pepperoni. How exciting! We placed the order for my pepperoni pizza, a lesser veggie pizza for the girl and a salad for her and her friend. I didn’t catch the price over the phone, but I figured it was just two pizzas and a salad, how expensive could it be? We were told the pizza would be over in about 20 minutes, but after 45 minutes or so, the doorbell finally rang with our pizza. The delivery guy handed me the receipt, which came out to a whopping 53 bucks! And not only that, but these pizzas were just the same size as the average Papa John’s large. This was madness, and I fully expected this pizza to blow me away.

I got down to business and started eating. The first thing I noticed was that this pizza did not blow me away. Not by a long shot. The pizza was a bit on the soggy side, probably due to the fact that they had taken too long to deliver it. Plus it was quite doughy as though it might have been rushed out of the oven. Other evidence of this was the lack of crisp in the crust. The tomato sauce and cheese were decent, but again, they were nothing spectacular and it seemed to me that the place wasted a lot of effort getting ingredients that added little-to-nothing to the experience.

Then there was the double pepperoni. A look at the pizza revealed that all the pepperoni looked exactly the same. Even so, I thought by taste I would be able to tell that I was eating two different special kinds of pepperoni. I was wrong. I could tell no difference amongst all the pepperoni. In fact, the pepperoni didn’t even taste special.

I love the concept of specialty pizza and am totally willing to pay a premium to get something special. Unfortunately, Brooklyn Pizza was nothing special and tasted like a pretty big waste of money.