Oh This Again. Poor You.
First off, if you like Hoobies I kindly request that you never visit this blog again. I don't exactly make a killing on this gay shit and I also don't give two shits about you, your opinion, or anything at-fucking-all. I write these reviews because somewhere along the line pizza became commodotized to the point that virtually no one can appreciate it beyond its price. Pizza Hut. Women making all-purpose dough in their disgusting bread machines. Dough balls from grocery stores. Buy One Get One Free. There's no doubt about it, that is our culture. We aren't heading there; we are there, in all things. Pizza is not a last salvation nor is it a last stand. It is, for me, the last funeral for a culture so corrupted as to be indistinguishable from utter goddamn shit. I write these reviews to remind people that such a thing as quality exists and it doesn't make you a complete faggot to appreciate such things in your life.
But now that I've reviewed most of the garbage in this town, I'm getting back to the habit of making my own pizza. For many this is merely next-level faggotry, and I appreciate those concerns. This bottle of bourbon I'm drinking straight also appreciates those concerns but this motherfucker is trying to tell me to appreciate nothing at all and he's pleading a hell of a case. Anyway, my pizza now consists of Caputo 00 Pizzeria flour, water, crummy yeast, salt and ~900F heat. These simple ingredients produce shockingly good results, albeit results I'm impossibly unimpressed with.
Bourbon is a good starting point for any endeavor. Pizza, date rape, national rebellions, it doesn't matter, this shit is just good. It's like family except it sucks way fucking less. Also, I'm gonna let Jack Daniels finish but Bulleit has some of the best bourbon of all time! I drink this shit and I want to kill whole countries full of illiterate savages. This shit makes me feel fucking American. In all honesty, there are really only two things I feel qualified to give decent reviews of and bourbon is one of them (pizza is not the other). There's a strong chance I will write a bourbon blog, too, if only because (as all theme park enthusiasts know) downward spirals are so much goddamn fun.
The other night I decided to get the makeshift oven really, really fucking hot:
The only way I know to quantify the heat level is to say that I cremated 8 babies in here. They burnt up like crack rocks in Baltimore. It was beautiful. And then I made a couple pizzas. The first pizza was a terrible abomination. Truth me told, I have no idea how to work with the new dough that I'm making. It's a completely different beast from the NY-style high gluten shit I am used to making. The first pizza was garbage so I threw it at my roommate who scommed it in about half a second.
Here's the second pizza I made. It cooked in under three minutes. I wasn't happy with a number of things about this pie but it was easily the tastiest crust I've ever shoved in my fat maw. That's not to say anything about this endeavor was good, it's mainly to say that I'm now more firmly resolved to become a gutter rat in Naples because shit like this will be thrown at me merely due to my disheveled, terrible appearance. In America the only things hurled at me are hilarious insults. As a hobo I'm going to have to side with the throwers of questionable caloric intake.
The problem with the oven which I have to resolve is that the floor is cooking much too fast relative to the dome, if you will. Solving that, these pizzas will come out really well in 90 seconds, I'm sure. That speaks nothing of the problems I'm having with the dough. They're too many to list here. Frankly, I don't know why you're even reading this garbage.
Brooklyn Pizza Co.
Brooklyn II: The Return of Brooklyn
In light of how glowing my review of the original Brooklyn Pizza Co. was, this review is bound to be shitty as hell, and more boring than the 'Health Nut' store located next to Brooklyn's Hampstead location. So I'll make this one short.
Looks pretty similar to the slice I reviewed at the other Brooklyn. Similarly small, which continues to baffle me because when I buy whole pies the slices are bigger than this, I swear. In any case, this slice wasn't as good as that other I reviewed, but it was still pretty damn good. If I had to guess, I'd say there wasn't as much sauce and cheese, so it wasn't quite as dank. The crust was good, as always.
I'll also mention that I tried a 'pepperoni pizza pinwheel' (as reviewed by PCF) or whatever they call em. It was a weird big old undercooked greeseball and not very appetizing, though it filled my fat face pretty well for $2.50+tax. God damn gut grenade. Also, I was charged $2.50+tax for a plain slice. Either Hampstead's price is higher than the other location or the dude fucked up (the dude probably fucked up).
Oh yeah this place has no seating, which is weird. I think Reel might've been the same way but I'm not sure because I was completely hammered when I went there. All of Hampstead weirds me the fuck out.
Viva Brooklyn!
2 recircs out of a possible 8 recircs (lower is better)
Wilmington's House of Pizza - $2.7016865 Us Highway 17 N, Hampstead NC 28443
Wilmington’s House of Pizza
Strange little place
My compliments to the photographer!
This is a curious establishment. I first caught wind of this place by way of Port City Foodies. I guess they were supposed to be called Pharaoh's Pizza, but changed their name at the last minute. King Tut still graces their menu, curiously. Late last week I inferred that they were open for business, after spotting over 9000 watts of neon blasting forth from their windows.
When some place calls themselves "House of [insert food item here]," you sort of expect that food item to be the flagship of the restaurant. I don't think I've ever had pancakes at IHOP, but that's only because pancakes are stupid. They're just lazy waffles, after all. However, as a pizza addict, WHOP piqued my interest, by virtue of its name alone.
Well fuck me running, pizza only makes up about 10% of the WHOP menu. This place has the most extensive menu of any place I can ever remember patronizing. They should have named this place Wilmington's House of Every-God-Damned-Thing. The menu is mostly various sandwiches and salads, plus some pizza, pasta, breakfast, bar food, wraps, burgers, calzones, seafood and desserts. Got that? All the prices look pretty good, though. Incomprehensibly, they don't offer slices on their menu. Wilmington's House of Pizza will gladly sell you souvlaki (wtf is that?) or flounder, but there's no mention of goddamn slices on their menu. Kind of off-putting.
They do offer a small cheese pizza for $4.50+tax, which is an okay deal (I guess):
This is the most spot-on replica of a Pizza Hut pan pizza I've ever had the misfortune of ingesting. If I were to rate this thing based on how much it tasted like Pizza Hut, it would do quite well. However, Pizza Hut doesn't make good pizza. So there you go.
As with Pizza Hut, WHOP's slice had unremarkable sauce and cheese. The crust was big and bready with a well-browned - yet very soft and sadly crunchless - bottom. If you love Pizza Hut but hate supporting huge multinational corporations (chances are no such people exist), I wholeheartedly recommend giving Wilmington's House of Pizza a whirl. They're probably cheaper than Pizza Hut, too.
On a positive note, it struck me that this pizza was created with care. That's more than I can say for a lot of the shit I've reviewed here. WHOP's pizza is what it is, and for what it is I guess it's alright. I'm just not a fan of what it is. I wish their Blodgett oven was put to far better use.
They should have called this place Hut of Pizza to make what they're offering more apparent right off the bat. In any case, I'll likely be going back there to try something else, probably a sub or maybe some souvlaki and motherfucking baklava.
And they seem to have a decent pizza oven too, what a shame.
5 1/2 recircs out of a possible 8 recircs (lower is better)
Wilmington's House of Pizza - $4.861016 South College Road, Wilmington, NC 28403
Hebrew Homebrew: Part Aleph
Though planning on cooking up some Neapolitan-inspired pizza in my new Weber grill-turned-pizza-oven, I ended up mixing up a batch of my standard NY-style high gluten dough that I haven't made in ages. This is because I presently lack a scale to accurately measure the ingredients, and I didn't want to waste this ritzy flour. Plus, I can make that other dough with my eyes closed and one dick tied behind my ear.
Step one: Get that shit lit, son:
Step 2: Arrange the coal and add some hardwood to get the temperature stupid-high. (not pictured)
Step 3: Oh shit it's fucking over 9000, maybe I should actually make the pizza. (not pictured)
Step 4: Get it in:
Step fuck you: I don't remember what happened next but this first pizza turned out okay. It didn't cook quite as fast as I was expecting but it was still fast as hell, maybe three or four minutes. I didn't take a picture of the finished pie (which was mushroom, tomato, shitty mozzarella and shitty sauce), but I did take a side picture of this slice right here:
This was one of the better looking slices, rim wise. The rest of them were suckier. On the whole this pizza was pretty mediocre. I don't know how many times I wanted to recirc after I stuffed my face with this crap, probably 8,400, which breaks my rating scale and puts me in dead last (behind places that serve cold pizza and drop their pizza on the ground).
This pie was a learning experience, as was the second and last pie that I made. By the time the second pie got in there, the temps had already begun to dip a fair amount and by the time it was 'done' the temps had falled to the 500-550F range, which sucks. However, the stone was still hot as a motherfucker so the bottom (over-)cooked really fast and since the dome temps were much lower, the top cooked more slowly. This resulted in an overly-done and overly-crunchy bottom. I didn't really mind it though and the flavor of the coal and the hickory was pretty awesome.
Yeah I skimped on the cheese, so what motherfucker. I was rushed and this pizza wasn't for me anyway so fuck you. Anyway this is just about the last of the high gluten flour I had, so I probably won't be making this style pizza again for a while. Next week I will make ritzy moon pizza and hopefully it will fucking suck.
The Future
Dear Reader (singular),
This blog is apparently nearing its logical conclusion. Therefore the pizzeria reviews will be much more infrequent from here-on-out. This is not only because I have little desire to try out the few places I have left to go to (besides Mellow Mushroom, which is simply a matter of waiting for my co-workers to suggest a Tuesday beer-lunch), but also because I just acquired a new pizza gadget, the KettlePizza Weber grill insert. With this alien technology I intend to make pizzas fit for the future King of Micronesia, John Vegas.
I'm probably going to make my first batch of dough (with some ritzy Caputo '00' pizza flour) tonight, acquire some coal and hardwood and bake some terrible pizzas tomorrow night. I'm shooting for temperatures north of 850F. I expect a long string of terrible failures and as such may document parts of this crummy adventure here on this worthless blog. Or not, in which case this post simply serves to explain why I might not be reviewing pizzas very regularly in the near future. That said, there will be a review in the next few days. In short, just ignore this fucking post.
The Original Incredible Gourmet Pizza
'Original' and 'Gourmet' never said so little
I'm guessing The Original Incredible Gourmet Pizza (whew) has no real current connection with the fairly upstanding Incredible location off of New Centre except in name. I'm guessing some sort of time-space fissure developed causing a rift between these two places, with this place continuing to make crummy pizza and the New Centre location beginning to make something of some merit.
The slice was about as much of a letdown as you would expect based on it's dumb appearance:
Well, maybe it doesn't look that bad. But it is small and goofy. Whole thing was floppy and stupid, possibly cooked on a screen (for shame). No crunch at all, anywhere. The rim of the crust was really doughy and undercooked and gross. The cheese was good and I have no opinion on the sauce. The dough/crust was the killer of this slice. If this were a game of Clue, you would have an easy game ahead of you.
Of note is that this place allegedly doesn't serve slices except during lunch hours. Fuck that shit. Even the copout idea of keeping a pie or two out and topping them as needed before the reheat would be a vast improvement over offering nothing. Offering tiny personal pizzas is no excuse for not offering slices if you purport to be a pizzeria. And what size pie was this slice cut out of, anyway? like 14-16"? Weaksauce.
If this is the original, give me the new shit any day. Gourmet? Get lost.
Stupid pizza.
6 recircs out of a possible 8 recircs (lower is better)
The Original Incredible Gourmet Pizza - $2.161978 Eastwood Road, Wilmington, NC 28403
Hoobie’s NY Pizza & Hoagies
So, I again ventured to Hoobie's. This time on a Thursday, at like fucking 2 p.m. or something. Last time I went to Hoobie's it was on a Monday at around 3 p.m. On Mondays they allegedly open at 4 p.m. for reasons no sane person could ever come up with. Here are their alleged hours:
Fucking closed. I pray to Couch Boulder that this place is fucking closed for real, for good, forever and for the good of all mankind. They looked forever-closed inside; bullshit was strewn about. Messy bullshit idiotic crap. If that's simply how they leave the joint when they leave, they disgust me. I hate this fucking place. I hope you are closed and also dead, forever.
Come to think of it, the inside of Hoobie's looks a fair bit like the inside of Pizza Joe's off Independence which closed like a year ago after the owner's addict son derped out or something, went full crackhead and caused the place tank to hell, and justly so because it was fucking nauseating. That place is still stocked with random pizzeria shit just lying around, after maybe more than a year. Stupidest shit I've ever seen.
In other news, it looks like Rudinos off Military Cutoff is definitely closed and becoming a New Balance store or something. Vast improvement over that vapid shitbird pizza.
I love it when shitty pizzerias fail. I love the shit out of it.
Britt’s Donut Shop
Pizza can fuck off
This place is located directly across from Frank's Pizza. Why am I reviewing Britt's? Because I can, and because fuck you, and because this bottle of Kentucky Supreme hasn't been drinking itself, that's why. Britt's is a magical experience. Eating a donut here is like sucking off a unicorn who ejaculates a molten sugar cloud of deliciousness directly into your soul.
This was, absurdly, my first Britt's donut of my entire, terrible life. I guess that's kind of fucked up since people drive hours to come eat this shit and I've lived vaguely close by for a while.
I don't know shit about donuts besides that they're fucking great. We used to go to some farm that made freshly-made donuts somewhere in Westchester, NY when I was a kid, but I don't think they had any of this glazed shit like Britt's has. If such an unholy beast existed nearby when I was a kid, I'd probably still be on the prolonged sugar high. I think my favorite donut there was a cinnamon sugar donut. Even with the rose-colored glasses of youth I can say that Britt's beats the shit out of whatever the fuck I was just talking about.
Zero recircs, this place is infinite. Buy a dozen donuts here, bring them into Frank's and eat them while humping all of the humpable things you can find in there.
Frank’s Pizza
Now this is the Carolina Beach I was expecting
I like Carolina Beach. There, I said it. And I wanted to like Frank's Pizza. In fact, I was expecting to like this place. I was expecting this to be the grand wizard of Carolina Beach's pitiful pizza scene. Sadly, that is just not how the pizza crumbled. The pizza did crumble, though. Hold on. Imma let you finish, but this was one of the strangest pizzas of all time!
Check this wacky motherfucker out:
What a weird fucking slice! Looks like the fatsos nearby on the beach with fat rolls for days. This is like the least appetizing looking slice of pizza I've ever bought. In terms of sheer, abjectly absurd ugliness it even trumps that fucking stupid slice I got from Slice of Life (though not by much).
Of note is that all that oregano on there was put on by them. And I think that is the fucking bees knees. Not many places around here do this and it's a shame because it's a quick and easy and, most importantly, legitimate way to add flavor to your otherwise mediocre pizza.
A picture really does tell a thousand words in this case. Obviously the crust is garbage. It was formed by a real jerk of a human, clearly. Additionally, it's too thin. And it has approximately zero salt in it. Also there may be no yeast. Like at all. It was so dry the rim crumbled when I fucking glanced at it. It's like some asshole stole some unleavened, tasteless dough from a miscellaneous Jew and pretended it was pizza dough for his own malevolent purposes. There was nothing good about this slice's crust. Here's another picture:
Here's the bottom of the crust. It looks burnt but it's not quite to that point. This is some pretty good browning here, in my opinion. But then look at the top of the pizza and it looks undercooked. It's a shame. But, the strangest motherfucking thing of all is that even though the bottom of this crust was nearly burnt, it was paradoxically the softest crust I've ever experienced. I cannot explain this. I will not even try. It was off-putting and sort of horrible.
The good news is that the rest of this slice was good. The cheese was pretty damn good, and the oregano was awesome, I loved it. The sauce was also pretty damn good. On the whole, I'll even say that the slice tasted pretty good, because of the spice, the sauce and the cheese. The crust, though, had zero flavor, zero moisture, a pitiful, unleavened crumb and it just made me want to recirc into infinity.
As I was leaving, one of the pizza makers dropped an entire pie onto the floor, as he was taking it out of the oven. Maybe he did the same with this plain pie, and maybe that would explain the shortcomings of the product which I received. Maybe this is just how they make pizzas here: 1. Make pie; 2. Throw it on the floor; 3. Sell that shit.
Points taken off for a terrible crust and what can only be described as a complete lack of pride in the product they peddle.
Dough is paramount.
5 1/2 recircs out of a possible 8 recircs (lower is better)
Frank's Pizza - $2.438 N Carolina Beach Ave, Carolina Beach, NC 28428
