This past week, pizza restaurants around Lexington came together to offer their best off-the-menu slices— each restaurant creating one kind of vegetarian pizza and one meat pizza for Lexington Pizza Week. As an annual event created by Smiley Pete Publishing, it was not just pizza-specific restaurants joining this venture. Some of the participating restaurants included Southland Lanes and Mi Pequeña Hacienda, showing that pizza ranges beyond what most people typically associate with a go-to pizza spot. I knew that I needed to test out some of the pizzas of the week, and got to work by first trying them hot, then eating a cold slice the next day.
I started out with a trip to The Big City Pizza Company, whose new pizza choices were the perfect beginning to a trip down pizza lane. When reading the various marketing ploys about the different participating restaurants and their new pizzas, my eye was caught by the Smokey Bourbon Mac Attack and The Mean Green Spinach Machine. They both sounded completely indulgent and tasty.
The Smokey Bourbon Mac Attack is described as “white cheddar Mac and cheese topped with chopped beef brisket, 100% mozzarella, savory bacon and finished with a bourbon glaze swirl” by the official Pizza Week website. I found that the large Cavatappi noodles paired well with the small bits of bacon and brisket, giving a southern cookout flavor as it mixed barbeque with the rich cheesiness. The crust was perfectly cooked and slightly chewy; it did not have the oven-fired smoky flavor, which gave the barbeque sauce its moment to shine. Overall, in the moment it was like heaven and even the next day, the cold leftovers of the remaining pizza held up phenomenally. . The crust, however, solidified even further, rendering anything without toppings inedible.
The Mean Green Spinach Machine took me by surprise with its richness and bold flavors. Though lacking in the diversity of the Smoky Bourbon Mac Attack’s flavor palette, a mouth-watering pizza of “creamy spinach artichoke dip and 100% mozzarella on our freshly made hand-tossed dough” rose beyond the level of its counterpart at Big City. At first taste, it was even better than the description. The spinach artichoke dip provided a wowing green base, topped with the perfect amount of mozzarella. The downside? As I switched back to the Smoky Bourbon Mac Attack, the Mean Green Spinach Machine quickly cooled to room temperature and became unpleasantly chewy, leaving the same crust as the other pizza to be ironically softer than the congealed mixture of spinach artichoke dip and cheese. The next day, the cold pizza became even harder and proved to be a jaw workout, leaving me no choice but to heat it up in my hall’s communal microwave.
In another attempt at marking pizzas off my list, I traveled the far distance to Goodfellas Pizza down off Manchester Street for the Frankies Pickles and the Artie Bucco. If you were not sure of the toppings on the first pizza, spoiler alert: it has pickles. Artie Bucco was reminiscent of one of the first pizzas of my week, the Mean Green Spinach Machine.
The Frankie Pickles was your average pepperoni pizza but with the addition of “zesty dill pickle chips finished with a buffalo ranch drizzle.” In my mind, I was not envisioning thin pickle chips just tossed onto the pizza, basically still raw with pickle juice. And yet, that is what I got. The spice of the pepperoni pizza did not pair well with the brine of the pickles, nor did the normal pizza sauce and the buffalo ranch drizzle. It seemed like a jar of pickles from the top shelf of the fridge spilled onto a perfectly good pepperoni pizza, and then a little bowl of buffalo-ranch sauce made with an unbalanced ratio tipped onto it when you were too busy panicking about the pickles falling. Maybe it just was not the pizza for me, but the yummy signature Goodfellas crust was not enough to save this pizza. Maybe regular ranch could have? Oh, and it didn’t hold up well the day after, either.
The second pizza had a lot to make up for, and unfortunately it did not. The pizza was their “take on a traditional spinach and artichoke dip,” but it seemed more like they threw a ton of cheese onto the crust with clumps of artichokes and a handful of spinach. Maybe it shifted as it was going into the oven, but the toppings (aside from the cheese) were unequally spread out over the pizza, leaving me with either a bite full of cheese, or a bite with only artichoke or spinach. Like the Mean Green Spinach Machine, refrigeration did it no favor. The copious amounts of cheese hardened, simply leaving a congealed slice of flat flavor.
It was a long week of driving, of eating pizza and having perpetual stomachaches (this was not a smart job to take as a lactose-sensitive person). I tried seven different pizzas (only listing four), and I think I’ve eaten enough pizza to last a lifetime. Or at least until I get a craving. But here are my rankings of the pizza places I did eat at: First place for quality of crust was Smashing Tomato (not listed). First place for flavor was Big City Pizza Company. First place for leftover-ability was Big City for their Smokey Bourbon Mac Attack pizza. And finally, first place for the amount of pizza for money spent (ten dollars per pizza–some slices and some as individual pizzas) was Goodfellas. After a crazy week of too much pizza, I would likely go back to Big City for my pizza needs. Or, if I am having a lazier day or I do not want to spend money, I will definitely be hitting Z.T.’s Bistro for a simple pepperoni pizza.