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Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Paradiso Pizza

Paradiso Pizza opened a few months ago as part of the Park Point development at RIT off Jefferson Road in Henrietta. It offers NY-style pizza, as well as wings, pasta, subs and salads. They have a variety of hot slices available or you can order a whole pie.
The pizza's, well, not bad. If I got this in NYC I'd be a little disappointed, but for around here it's OK. It's appropriately thin
, and the slices are foldable, as they should be, but the crust lacks crispness. That's a common problem with so-called NY-style pizzas in this area, which I attribute to their ovens not being hot enough. You can tell when you look at the underside because it's pretty evenly browned, whereas a good slice in NYC will have some blackish charred (which is not the same as burnt) spots on the bottom.
Other than that, though, it was a pretty decent approximation of what you'd find at a typical corner pizza joint in the City. The mozzarella was nice and chewy and had bubbled and browned bit in the oven, and the sauce was pretty straightforward, adding a touch of tomatoey acidity but staying in the background, the way that sauce should.
There's some seating
available, but I can imagine a lot of customers either grabbing a slice on the go between classes or taking a pie back to the dorm room. Paradiso didn't knock my socks off, but if I were an RIT student I'd be glad to have it on campus. I'll give it a B.


Thursday, February 12, 2009

Getting started

This will be an occasional, idiosyncratic exploration of pizza places in and around Rochester NY. As a reference point, my ideal pizza is classic, NY-style pizza, the kind you get at a pizza-slice joint in the City. The gourmet brick-oven stuff is fine, as is thicker Rochester-style pizza and even deep dish, if it's well made, so I'll try to keep an open mind. I'll also try to give a reasonably objective description of the pizza as well as my subjective impression, including a grade from A+ to F. Let me know if there's anything you'd like to see added or changed.