Rochester Pizza Palooza Report

 Last evening I attended Rochester Pizza Palooza 2025 at Comedy @ The Carlson with my family. We had a fine time, until ... well, I'll get to that later.

The doors opened at 5:00 for Happy Hour in the bar area, and the pizza tasting started at six in the adjacent room where the comedians perform. We arrived around 5:45 to find the barroom pretty crowded; attendance was certainly good.

The doors to the tasting room opened a few minutes after six. Although there were supposed to be nine pizzerias represented, I think there were eight. I could be mistaken, but I don't recall seeing one of the listed participants, Mac's Pizza Shack.

Each of us was given a ballot where we could vote for Best Traditional Pizza, Best Specialty Pizza, and Best Booth. At each booth (table, really), they had at least two and in some cases several pizzas to choose from. Some places opted to do very narrow slices, others did a square cut, but naturally these were just small sample size pieces.

I will confess, I did not try every pizza from every pizzeria. As much as I love pizza, I can only eat so much. And the fuller I got, the more discriminating I became, so I would forgo trying a pizza that didn't look particularly tempting or intriguing to me.

I won't try here to describe or rank all the pizzas I tried, but I will say that my overall favorite was the waaay too-longed-named Tuscan Wood Fired Pizza ~ Tony Tomatoes Italian Take Out & Food Truck Catering (which I reviewed in 2011). They had several varieties of both thin- and thick-crust pizza, all of which that I tried were very good.

They had one advantage over the other pizzerias, in that they use a food truck, with a pizza oven inside. It was parked right out front, so they were able to bring hot pizza in as needed, fresh out of the oven. The other pizzerias, I assume, were bringing in pies from their various locations, and they had no means of reheating or crisping them. But even taking that into consideration, I really liked "Tuscan." The crust was very good, not just in the baking, but in the rising. Chewy, airy, flavorful. They know their stuff.

My wife particularly liked Gia's Pizza Kitchen from East Rochester.  I wish I had tried more than the one bite-size sample I got, which didn't thrill me, but it was too small a sample size to go by.

And my wife's instincts were borne out by the results of the voting. Gia's won for best traditional. I will move Gia's to near the top of my list to try, for a full (and fairer) review. 

Tuscan (Tony) won for best specialty. They had several on offer, which was a smart move because voters didn't have to specify a particular specialty pizza. But I especially liked what I believe was their Roman-style Margherita. It had a thick but airy crust, charred underneath, heavily topped with lightly seasoned tomatoes, fresh mozzarella and basil. Kudos to them also for putting out labels in front of each pizza, so you knew what you were looking at.

Best booth went to Rhino's, which featured their dill pickle pizza. I should've tried it, but the line was long and I was pretty full by the time I thought about it, which meant I couldn't have given it my fairest consideration, as food always tastes better when you're hungry. It's another one for the to-do list. But their booth was nicely decorated and they did a good job in presenting their wares.

So it was a fun event. Really good. And now we get to the until I mentioned earlier.

I have an unfortunate tendency to be a fast eater, so I got done pretty quickly. It was only a little after seven, but I had no particular desire to stick around for the announcement of the winners. My family were done too. So we left. 

I had parked in an open-air lot across the street, among a bunch of other cars. But when we got there, something was amiss. I didn't see my car.

The car was gone. I knew exactly where it had been; it wasn't there. I started questioning myself:  did I lock it? Yes, I did. I'm positive. Called 911, RPD showed up, they had found some inexpensive personal items that had been inside my car a few blocks away near where another stolen car was found. Fortunately one of those items was the registration document with my name on it, so the police officer was able to determine that all that stuff was mine.

I'm told these cars typically show up in a few days, once they've run out of gas. But who knows?

The staff at Comedy @ The Carlson were very nice to us when we told them what happened. I don't want to come down on them. The primary responsibility lies with the scumbags who stole my car. I wish there were some way to make them understand that if they put half that effort into doing something productive with their lives, their lives might turn out better. 

Nevertheless, I would like to advise anyone out there that this particular lot is, from what I was told, hit often by the "Kia Boys." I don't want to discourage anyone from attending events at Comedy @ The Carlson, but you should know that the parking lot across the street is not monitored. Park there at your own risk.

I'll post updates as they become available.

Update, May 22: My car was found, and taken to the RPD impound lot on Colfax St. I had to go sign some papers to get it released to be towed to a garage. I also was able to retrieve any personal items from inside the car. Aside from my umbrella and a couple books, everything was gone. It was sunny when they stole the car, so they had no need for an umbrella, and I guess the thieves aren't much for reading. Perhaps if they had spent more of their formative years reading, they wouldn't be wasting their lives stealing cars now.

 

Rochester Pizzapalooza

 I don't generally promote stuff, but I do like to keep people informed, so for those pizza lovers out there who actually read this blog, there is an event coming up next Tuesday.

Rochester Pizzapalooza will be held at Comedy at the Carlson from 5-8 p.m. Nine local pizzerias will be offering their wares. I'll be there. I think I've tried all the participating pizzerias but one, which I hadn't been aware of, Alpha Street Pizzeria. 

I will fast all day so I can try as much pizza as possible, and post a report.

PizzaPie Pizzeria

After getting a haircut at the barbershop I've been going to for 30+ years, Winton Hair Stylist (I get no remuneration from them, they don't even know about my blog), I decided to stop by a nearby pizzeria that was on my to-do list, PizzaPie Pizzeria.

They opened at noon on this Tuesday, and I got there around 12:10. No slices available just then, but there were some on the way. I got a cheese slice to go.

The first thing I noticed was how thin it was. It passed the fold test (I could fold it without it flopping down), and there was a bit of crackling underneath, but it was so thin that I could easily fold it onto itself. It was fresh out of the oven, so it didn't get a re-crisping, but I think the reason it passed the fold test is that it weighed so little. 

The sauce was so lightly applied it might've been painted on with a brush, but it had a pleasantly tangy flavor, and it was in good proportion to the thin crust.  The cheese, I wasn't so impressed with. It was also lightly applied, which was OK, but instead of melting had dried out and shrunk along the edges of the shreds. I think it was part-skim (not the best choice for pizza, in my opinion), and it did add a bit of flavor but it didn't enhance the slice the way that well-melted, quality mozzarella would.

Having written all this, it seems to me that it comes off as if I didn't like this pizza. That's not the case. For what it was, it wasn't bad. 

The shortcoming, to me, is what it was, which was a bare-bones, dare I say "cheap" slice. Super-thin, to the point that there was no interior to speak of. Not much sauce, and what cheese there was struck me as the budget stuff. It reminded me of the "dollar" slices you can find in New York City. Not bad, really, but not bad for the price. (I don't recall exactly what I paid for this slice but I think it was around $3.50.)

This was just one visit and one slice. Maybe another visit, or an entire pie would yield a different result. And I must re-emphasize that I didn't dislike this pizza. It was OK. But just OK.

PizzaPie Pizzeria, 1827 East Ave., Rochester

585-448-0141

 Monday Closed
Tuesday 12pm - 8pm
Wednesday 12pm - 8pm
Thursday 12pm - 8pm
Friday 12pm - 9pm
Saturday 12pm - 9pm
Sunday 12pm - 8pm

 

Red Zone

This story starts in the first decade of the 20th Century. Well, sort of.

In 1904 or thereabouts, a building was built on East Main Street in Rochester, that became home to Sibley's department store. 

For those who are too young to know, department stores were places where they sold a bunch of stuff--in person, not online--arranged by "departments." They were sort of like Walmart except they had high-end stuff, and nobody was embarrassed to admit they bought their clothes there. And they were often located right in the middle of cities. Where did people park, you might ask? On the street, maybe, but many shoppers didn't have to worry about parking, because there was good, reliable mass transit. 

Eventually Amazon and Walmart drove everyone else out of business, and all the buildings that used to house department stores became vacant or fell into disrepair, everyone who had the means to do so fled to the suburbs, and so on. (OK, I'm oversimplifying, but I'm trying to get to the point, which is to get us back to the Sibley Building.) 

Sibley's was huge for many years, but then declined, got bought by another company, and closed in the 1990s. So now we had this beautiful, historic building in the heart of downtown Rochester with its namesake tenant gone. 

In 2012, the building was bought by Winn Companies, which has since redeveloped the building for multiple uses, including retail, office and residential space. 

Part of that includes "Mercantile on Main," which I suppose could be described as a food court, but that wouldn't really do it justice. Yes, there are a number of walk-up, takeout places, but there's also a bar serving Spanish and Mediterranean dishes, the setting of the Sibley Building atrium is quite pleasant, and you won't find any national chain establishments. I believe they are all local and one of a kind.

To my way of thinking, no food court, high-end, low-end or otherwise, is worth a damn without pizza.  In Mercantile on Main, we have Red Zone, which offers a variety of thin-crust slices.

First time around, I like to stick with the basics, so I got a cheese slice. 

Hmm. There were things I liked, and things I didn't. It resembled a New York-style slice, but judged by that standard it fell short. It passed the fold test, meaning I could fold it and hold it horizontally without it flopping over, and the underside was dry, not oily (a good thing), but it was more browned than charred and it was not at all crackly. I could not only fold it, I could roll it up (not a good thing). Although it's easy to overlook the crust--which is why pizza chains make such a big deal about overloading their pizza with toppings and stuffing the crust, to distract you from how crappy the crust is--the crust is the backbone of every pizza, and this crust didn't wow me.

No complaints about the sauce or cheese. They balanced each other well. The cheese was nicely melted and both were added in good proportions to each other and to the crust. The sauce seemed a bit on the sweet rather than acidic/tangy side.

This is an observation rather than a complaint, but the slice had a prominent flavor of what I will generically call "Italian" herbs. I didn't attempt to dissect them into individual components (oregano, basil, etc.), but it was quite noticeable. At first I thought it was the sauce but there were visible dried herbs on top, so maybe someone just had a heavy hand with the herb shaker. Again, I'm not necessarily complaining, as it didn't overpower the other components and it certainly gave the slice a distinctive flavor. And where pizza is concerned, I appreciate distinctiveness.

I came away from this thinking, this was good, but it could've been a lot better. Red Zone is relatively new, and far be it from me to tell them how to make pizza, but I think a few tweaks would be all it takes to elevate their pizza significantly. 

Just some thoughts, but I wonder about the oven temperature. For thin crust, you generally want high temp, short baking time. Could they crank up the temp a bit? 

I frankly didn't notice what type of oven they use, but for personal reasons I find myself in the Sibley Building occasionally so next time I'll take a look. That may affect what they can do, temperature-wise.

Dough preparation is also a question. Again I will defer to the pros but a long ferment is generally going to result in a better crust. If a pizzeria advertises that they make their dough every day, on the same day that they bake it, that's not a good thing. Dough needs time.

And maybe take it easy on the herbs. If you want to make that a part of your signature, fine. I was good with it. But I'd solicit some opinions from your customers.

I enjoyed my pizza, make no mistake. I just thought, a little bit of adjustment and they can go from pretty good to very good or great.

 Red Zone Pizza, at Mercantile on Main

240 East Main St., Rochester

Mon. - Fri. 11 a.m. - 2 p.m.