New in my area; I don’t know how widespread they are.
They make your pizza, assembly line fashion, right in front of you. You pick the sauce, you pick the cheese, you pick the toppings. They bake it and bring it to you.
It seemed a little labor-intensive, but the price was low and the quality was high. Thin crust only, alas, but that’s the point: they have to be able to bake it fast, to keep the assembly line moving.
Yummy! I had mine with everything! Total “works” garbage pizza! If they’d have had anchovies, I’d have had anchovies!
Is this chain catching on other places? (I’m in San Diego, CA.) I hope they succeed; I’m going back again and again!
(This is not a paid or interested recommendation!)
I don’t know of any chains around here(NE Kansas) that do that, but an independent place here in Topeka does. I love their pizza. One of my favorites I have them build is what I call Greek pizza, with tzitki sauce, feta cheese, kalamata lives and fresh spinach leaves, and presses lamb slices.
We have them here in the Silicon Valley area, including one in my bedroom community town. We had no decent pizza here before this.
I love them! The build-it-yourself concept is nice, because all the ingredients are fresh and good. I’m especially impressed because even without hand-tossing and fussing, they achieve that thin, Neopolitan style crisp and chewy crust. That’s my own crust preference, so I’m fine with that.
It’s about $8 per 11" pizza. Am I remembering right that it’s always the same price, no matter what you load onto it?
We have a very similar thing here called Blaze. All pizzas are the same size and you can have as many or as few ingredients and it is all the same price. You order like you would at Qdoba and then the put it in a blazing hot oven for 3 minutes and you are good to go. My teenage sons love it and go there all the time for a quick snack.
We also have a place called Pizzology which is nowhere close (other than they serve pizza). It is run by one of the best chefs in the mid-west and serves some of the best gourmet pizza I’ve ever had. You can get some standards, but the best bet is to go with whatever they have as the chef’s choice. I’ve never been disappointed other then I’ve gone back and wanted it again and they didn’t have the ingredients that day.
There was a big article in the paper today about both Blaze and Pieology opening places here in Las Vegas, and the article touted the same line that you did. The thing is, if you skip the part I drew a line through, this is true of, oh, all pizza everywhere that isn’t frozen. All pizza is customized. Heck, most places will even put stuff on only half the pizza if you ask them. Customized pizza isn’t a new thing or even a big deal, any more than customizable hot dogs or hamburgers are a big deal. FFS, even McDonald’s will hold the pickle (or whatever else) if you just ask.
And most pizza places will make it right in front of you. A pizza restaurant might not, but a regular pizza joint? Hell yeah, there’s no where else for them to be but right there in front of you.
I predict this will be a short-lived trend. I doubt in 8-10 years we’ll see many of these pizza places around.
I disagree. At http://www.800degreespizza.com/ you can get a pizza with high end ingredients for less than $10. There is a reason that their line goes out the door and down the street at times. Also, they offer far more variety than your average pizza place. They fill a real market niche that isnt likely to die out any time soon.
Where I went, there were two pricing tiers: a “basic” selection of a certain number of toppings…or, for a little more, unlimited toppings.
Snowboarder Bo: the reason I used the phrase “assembly-line fashion” is that the pizza moved down a line, tended by different persons performing separate subassembly tasks. One guy made the crust; the next guy spooned on the sauce; the next guy spread on the cheese; and two more guys crumbled on the toppings. Someone else shoveled it into the oven, and, finally, the last guy brought it to the table.
Subway sandwiches are also sometimes made “assembly-line fashion,” with different people taking on different phases of the production.
We have a chain up here called “Mod” which follows the same concept - thin crust pizza for one, any toppings of your choice, for a flat price of $7.47. They started in Seattle about 10 years ago and they’re popping up all around the nation now.