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2014-05-01
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I saw this Groupon deal where you get a $100 voucher for $200 worth of food as I wanted to try out this new pizza place. A pizza place where you choose your own toppings and all made to order ... JUST LIKE SUBWAY! Genius? Right? So, with discount deal, boyfriend and I decided to go here for dinner after a day at the art museum.The restaurant had a very clean design. Everything was white and black with touches of red. There are fabulous huge windows in the back of the restaurant for a great windo
The restaurant had a very clean design. Everything was white and black with touches of red. There are fabulous huge windows in the back of the restaurant for a great window view but we couldn't get a spot there. It's also basically a find your own spot type of restaurant...very fast food feel. There is a counter where you line up to choose your number of toppings, the server puts them on and into the oven it goes. You then pay and they give you a wooden chopping board with your number and wait for your pizza to come. They have a machine where they flatten the raw pizza dough without the old fashioned tossing it in the air action. And when the pizza comes out of the oven, they have a machine to cut it all at once. The owner or head chef was also Italian and if you watch Top Chef Masters, he looked like Hubert Keller.
As you can see from the menu, 3 toppings cost $108 and $6 toppings cost $148. After that it's $15 each but you can only have a maximum of eight toppings. All come with all you can drink soft drinks that you get from the counter where you get utensils and extra seasonings like various different olive oils, herbs and dried chilli peppers. There was quite a decent selection of toppings with even different cheeses you can choose from along with two different tomato sauces (spicy and not spicy). However, what this place didn't explain was that one of the toppings was the sauce. So, for example, if you chose 3 toppings, one of them was the sauce so you only had 2 more to choose from. I think that was a bit ridiculous as how can you have pizza without the sauce? It's what is used to stick the toppings on. It should be considered a basic need, like the pizza dough. It also would be helpful to have little signs of what the toppings were. There were various sausages and meats that I wasn't sure about. I guessed salami and parma but what were the others? And the grilled eggplant looked a lot like the grilled zucchini. If the place got really busy, would the server really have that much time to explain each and every topping to the customers?Boyfriend and I ordered one pizza where we added roasted capiscums, sundried tomaties, mushrooms, mozerella cheese and parma ham. Along with nonspicy tomato sauce for a total of 6 toppings. We didn't want an order of salad as the selections didn't look very interesting and boyfriend doesn't eat anything green so it would only end up on my plate. We added an order of fries and the soup of the day which was tomato soup. They didn't have chef recommendation that day. They also didn't have a one third pre-made pizzas, too, that day.
The fries were those big chunky ones which are quite good. Crispy on the outside. Soft on the inside. They even lightly salted it. But since we're both from North America, it's ketchup all the way.
Our pizza came out quite quickly. It was brought to our table. Toppings were top notch. Pizza crust is a thin crust pizza and was quite tasty, though could be a bit more crispier. But at least all the toppings didn't slide off. Also, perhaps due to the fact they used a machine to slice the pizza, we had some very uneven slicing where some slices were really large and some were really small.
We also added a tomato soup which came in a medium sized coffee cup. Thick, tomato with lots of herbs. Very good.Service was still working out some of the kinks. There was one point when boyfriend and I lined up to order and waited while the person behind the counter was shuffling raw pizza dough around until someone asked if this is the queue to order. The cashier was also not at their assigned spot until someone came over. Also, since this is Hong Kong, most of the service staff only spoke English except for the person who worked the cashier and a lady who seemed like the hostess who spoke Cantonese. I speak fluent English so it's not a problem, but I did hear one person ask a server if the drinks were refillable in Cantonese and that person couldn't help them as she didn't understand. Considering this not geared towards being a high end establishment, I think the general population it is geared towards may have a bit of a communication problem. Also, servers should wear gloves when handling the toppings. I know it may seem stupid but it seems to be the trend in many restaurants lately where gloves are used instead of ungloved hands and there are actual people out there who feel better when they see servers using gloves.
The place has lots of potential especially since it's located near the movie theater where many people would probably go there for a quick bite before seeing a movie. It just needs a bit of improvement. I have high hopes for this. I will return.
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