Audience Particpation Needed

My wife thought of doing something fun, you, the reader, get to participate in a fun game. I describe my experience and you get to give your own thoughts and review this restaurant. Are you ready? Here we go.

So, we went to a regular restaurant in Columbia. Jonny's Pizza has been open since May of 2011. We haven't been there yet as it seems to always be closed on Mondays and closed at most times when we have free time. We finally got in and after waiting a few minutes for a booth to be cleared, my wife and two kids had a spot.

This is the inside of this pizza place? Bland walls, white trim, black booths and fake hardwood flooring. The chairs are normal, cheap metal frame chairs and the tables are basic black with laminate tops. So, this restaurant says that it is famous for their Chicago style pizza, and happy that it is the only one in the area that serves it. So, since this is my "choose your own adventure" or "make your own review" post, I'll skip my opinions further-on. So, we order a few things. We ordered a small pizza, the "meatlovers" which has sausage, hamburger, pepperoni and Canadian bacon. The pizza was $11.50. This is what came:

The pizza was hand-tossed, freshly made crust, with a tad of that yeast flavoring in it, a sweet sauce and all of those items on it. The cheese made strings when you pull it showing how elastic it is and the sausage was a bit spicy, full flavored and perfectly cooked. If this was your pizza, what would you give it?

Next we also had some bread sticks ordered.

The bread sticks and dipping sauce consisted of a frozen bread stick which was heated in the pizza oven. You could and can still see the black burn marks from the rack inside of the pizza oven. All the bread sticks were the same size, shape and flavor. All were chewy within 20 minutes. This was $3.95. The sauce is what they call, their "special sauce". By special, I believe it means that it was canned spaghetti sauce with a cup of sugar added. So sweet, in fact, that it was moving away from the savory side and towards the sweet side. What would you give this one?

My wife wanted to try something different and her and I being close enough to St. Louis, where I'm originally from, and having had many times, St. Louis style Mostaccioli, we were expecting something more like the heaping, heavy amounts of Mostaccioli noodles with a thick sauce over and mixed around them, complete with big pieces of onions. Well, what was delivered was this:

So, if you ordered Mostaccioli and received this, what would you rate it? This is the same sauce, as the pizza and the bread stick dipping sauce. This is the overly sweet sauce. This was $7.75.

Next was the salad, the above pasta dish came with a small salad. They call it a "dinner salad" and they mention that it is made with iceberg lettuce, olives, cucumber and tomato. This is what it looked like:

The original salad, as plated before we started to eat, had 2 olives, one slice of cucumber and one tomato. It also has a Fat Free Ranch that was so acidic that it could strip paint off of a tank. (Probably not my opinion or an exaggeration there.) What would give this salad?

I have saved the best for last. We ordered the Hawaiian Chicago style pizza. This is what it looked like:

This is a small Chicago style Hawaiian pizza, going for $11.95. This pizza had a layer of bottom crust, a layer of toppings and then a layer of cheese on top where a large puddle of that same sweet sauce was poured. The sauce on the top of the pizza was not only cool, but also, about a 4th of an inch thick. The inside of a slice looks like this:

The pizza had a crust that was mushy and wet and soggy. The ham was diced and not fully cooked. It was simple ham, nothing special about it. The crust and dough tasted like pineapple, which could have been explained by the obviously canned pineapple chunks thrown into the pizza pie. The water and juice from the pineapple had caused the dough and crust to be mushy and soggy so that it was hard to eat this pizza. Chicago style pizza has a hard crust on the bottom and sides, not soggy and wet. In the very bottom of the picture, in the middle shows something that looks like a white rectangle. That item is a piece of raw onion. Onions were used in this pizza and none of them, not a single one, was cooked. They were raw still and so raw, that they still had the tart, sour flavor. The chunks of onion and ham had made small indentations and spots in the bottom layer of cheese, which could indicate that they cooked the bottom layer with the cheese on it, then threw the ham and onions on to cook on top, then threw the pineapple and then finished the top layer. The canned pineapple would have added enough moisture to soak the cooked food underneath it, as is evident by this picture of liquid, not sauce, liquid on the pizza pan.

The silvery color on the right of the picture is the pan and that other color is the water, just liquid coming from the pizza pie. Again, there wasn't a bite that didn't have wet crust, raw onions, or cold sauce on top. So, what would give a pizza like this?

My wife's suggestion was that as a local business, I wouldn't have to trash it when I review it, only give an honest and truthful experience and leave it up to the reader to make their own decisions. So, I hope you came up with your stars, out of 5, in each category for this restaurant. I will only input this statement, this fact: my family and I will never be coming back to this place.

Thanks for playing!

Canned Bread!

Ok, so I watch Spongebob. I think of the show much like how the Simpsons used to be, in that it has some strange and clever moments within the kid's show. So, one episode had the octopus, Squidward, go to a gated community. The whole episode was an obvious satire of the concept of gated communities. So, while in this community, Squidward sees others of his same race and look. Some of them with long hair, some with different colored shirts, but all of them with the same personality and likes that each other has. So, while he is in a market, he looks up and says "Canned bread! This place has everything!"

Well, as cool as that is, I thought about how weird canned bread must be, especially having the ability and know-how to make bread myself at home. I do see that it could be created and even cooked in a can, during the canning process.

So, while a trip to our own market: Dierburgs, I saw something that would make Squidward ecstatic: Canned Bread!

So, we have the can and the only flavor they had was this brown bread. I would have loved to see something like the regular white bread in a can, but this works as well.

Brown bread is interesting as it is flavored with molasses. It also has a bit of a noticeable salt flavor, do to the large amount of sodium, but still a pretty good bread, from a can. My expectations were not that high in the first place, because it is something from a can. But the bread tasted okay, in fact, good enough that I will eat the whole loaf. A 3 out of 5 stars for me.