Adventure #43: North by Northwest

When Karin and I started, we had agreed to stick to pizzerias first, and then later branch out to restaurants that also happened to serve pizza. After this deviation, we're going to keep sticking to the rules. "Uh oh," you say. Uh oh is right.

Now, I'm unlikely to be as critical as the good fellows that joined us on this adventure - the very cool Hunt brothers from PizzaHunt. But, you're about to see me be upset with some 'za.

North by Northwest, or NXNW, as they go by, is a classy-looking place that serves classy-looking food. I've eaten non-pizza there a few times, and the food is good, as is their craft beer. My complaint is specifically about their undercooked pizza with a strangely tasteless crust.

We sampled two pizzas:

Brunch Pizza: eggs, bacon, tomatoes, green onions, mushrooms, and goat cheese.

Artichoke Pizza: basil pesto, marinara, roasted red peppers, sundried tomatoes, artichoke hearts, fresh mozzarella.

It's apparent that they use high-quality ingredients here. The basil pesto deserves praise for being "Ian's favorite pesto encountered during a pizzadventure". The artichoke hearts were nice, and I enjoyed the goat cheese on the brunch pie. Aside from that, there's not much to recommend.

The eggs on the brunch pie had a school cafeteria feel to them; the other ingredients didn't seem to mesh, either. And the crust was, as mentioned, dull, tasteless, and lacking in any flexibility. I was sad when Karin traded one of the pieces on this pie to me for one of the artichoke slices.

The artichoke pie was markedly better, but suffered from the same problems - the ingredients did not seem to mesh, and the crust (while cooked a little longer than the brunch pie), was still not passable.

It's a shame that a place with what looks to be a very nice wood-fired oven and a menu full of other delicious food can't pull of the most important parts of pizza. It's also a shame that our server, after forgetting about one of our drink orders, and not keeping our water full, had the audacity to say 'I feel bad, maybe you guys should buy another round' to us after we'd been sitting and talking for a while after paying. We weren't holding up any tables, either - the place was half empty. Deuces, bro. Deuces, NXNW.