Tony Pepperoni Buffalo Chicken Pizza, and a Giveaway

I happened to be in Henrietta the other day around noon, so I decided to stop in to Tony Pepperoni on West Henrietta Road, maybe a half mile south of Marketplace Mall. I've enjoyed their thin-crust pizza in the past, but it had been a few years since I was there.
I had forgotten how extensive an array of pizza Tony Pepperoni offers, but I was quite impressed with the selection and found it difficult to choose. I was particularly intrigued by one french-fry-laden pie, which I was told was the "Tony Plate" pizza, but in the end I went for a single slice of Buffalo chicken pizza.
I also took the opportunity to speak to owner Mark DiPaola. He and his brothers bought the business shortly after it opened, and he's been at it now for over ten years. As with any good owner, Mark's love and enthusiasm for the pizza business came through clearly in our brief conversation.
The pizza here is generally NY style. It's thin, and made with high-gluten flour, which allows the dough to be stretched into large pies, with a crisp, chewy crust. 
My Buffalo chicken slice was quite good, with a thin, crisp, crackly crust topped with medium hot sauce and unbreaded chunks of diced chicken. 
For this pie, Tony Pepperoni uses a blend of cheeses. I found a base of melted, processed mozzarella, topped with finely shredded cheddar, and I detected some blue cheese in the mix as well.There are different ways to go with Buffalo chicken pizza, but this was a good take on the style, that struck a nice balance between the flavor of Buffalo wings and the underlying pizza base.
Given its relative longevity in the highly competitive pizza business, Tony P's has clearly found a winning formula. When I asked about future changes, Mark told me that there may be some tinkering with the menu, to keep up with current trends. But the menu is already pretty extensive; I count 18 specialty pizzas, and they do wings, subs, salads, and more. A second location is also possible, down the road, but for the moment Mark's got plenty to keep him occupied, between his current operation and tending to a three-kid family at home.
Had I been hungrier, I would have availed myself of more of Tony Pepperoni's slice choices, but this slice alone was large enough to make for a good quick lunch. The rest will have to wait.
If you'd like to find out for yourself how good the pizza is here, here's your chance to do so for free. Mark was kind enough to provide me with two gift certificates, one for a large one-topping pie, and another for a large specialty pie.
To be eligible to win either, just leave a comment at the end of this blog post. If you have a preference as to which you win, please state your preference, and if I can, I'll honor it. I can't guarantee you'll get your preference, but I don't think you can go wrong either way.
Win or lose, stop by Tony Pepperoni's sometime and let the guys know that the Rochester Pizza Guy recommended it.
I'll pick two winners next Friday, June 6, a little after noon.

Tony Pepperoni, 4164 W. Henrietta Rd.
585-334-2830
Open 11 a.m. - 10 p.m. daily

Lovin' Cup, Park Point at RIT

Park Point, the retail / residential development that opened a few years ago at RIT, has several dining choices available, including a full-fledged pizzeria, Paradiso.
But Paradiso is not the only place at Park Point where it's possible for a person to purchase pizza (how's that for alliteration?). Pizza's also on the menu at Lovin' Cup, a restaurant / bar / coffeehouse that features several personal-size pies on its menu. I had lunch there recently.
Though I really dislike cutesey names for dishes, I sucked it up and ordered a "Stroll Around the Moon," which is a Margherita in everything but name.
Before I get to the pizza, I must digress for a moment to say that I've no idea where they came up with the name for this pizza. A lot of menu items at Lovin' Cup - which itself is named after a Rolling Stones song - are taken from popular music, like the "Blue Suede Shoes" pizza and the "White Rabbit" burger (which is not made with rabbit meat, by the way). But googling "Stroll Around the Moon" did not turn up any songs of that name; the closest I got was "Circling Around the Moon" by John Mellencamp, "Walking on the Moon" by the Police, and several variations of  "Ring (or Rings) Around the Moon," by a number of artists.
At any rate, my pizza (which I will henceforth refer to as a Margherita) had a thin-to-medium thick crust, which was a little charred here and there underneath. It was very firm, and quite crunchy along the edge.
This is strictly my subjective impression, but to me there was something about this crust that seemed pre-made. Probably it was that firmness - the slices weren't really supple at all, and though they were a little chewy on the inside, they lacked the fresh-bread aroma and texture that marks what I consider a great pizza crust.
The crust seemed to have been given a light coating of olive oil, atop of which lay finely diced tomatoes, thinly shredded basil, and a layer of melted mozzarella. The menu describes the cheese on this pie as fresh mozzarella - the only pizza here given that "fresh" designation - and it was good cheese, with a smooth, creamy texture, but it was not the bright white fresh mozzarella that's typically applied in sliced rounds. It was beautifully melted but was gooier and spread more uniformly across the pizza than the fresh mozzarella I'm used to seeing. Maybe I just need to learn more about the different kinds of mozzarella.
Overall, this pizza was pretty flavorful, with a certain tanginess and a prominent flavor of basil. I frankly wasn't thrilled with the crust, but my impression was that the pizzas here are more about the toppings than the crust.
Lovin' Cup is a good-sized place, with a large dining area and a full bar, which features a well-chosen, oft-changing selection of microbrews. The rest of the food menu runs toward soups, salads, and hot and cold sandwiches, and there's a wide variety of coffee drinks available. I liked the place; the pizza, well, it had its ups (good cheese, good flavor, albeit a bit heavy on the basil) and downs (stiff, lifeless crust), which kind of cancel each other out, so I'll give it a right-down-the-middle C.
Lovin' Cup Bistro & Brews, 300 Park Point Dr. Suite 101 (at RIT).
Tel.: 292-9940
Hours:  Mon. 11 a.m. - 11 p.m., Tue. & Wed. 11 a.m. - midnight, Thu. - Sat. 11 a.m. - 2 a.m., Sun. noon - 10 p.m.

Paradiso Mediterranean Dream

One of the first pizzas I reviewed on this blog was from Paradiso Pizza at RIT's Park Point development. I'm not sure why, I think I just happened to go there right about then.
Since then, Paradiso opened a second location on Lyell Avenue, which has in the meantime closed and reopened as Dom's Pizzeria, leaving the RIT location as the only Paradiso around (Paradiso's website needs some updating in that regard).
While I've seen mixed reviews on the web, I've thought that Paradiso made decent enough NY-style pizza, and their "Mediterranean Dream" sounded really good to me - feta cheese, fresh spinach, tomatoes and black olives, over a bed of garlic and oil.
When I went to pick it up, I also thought I might solve what had been a mystery to me, which is why Paradiso's website says that they've been "in the pizza business for 35 years."
In that regard, though, I was disappointed. I asked the person behind the counter if she knew why the website would say that, since Paradiso only opened at RIT within the past couple of years, but I got a very curt, "No" in response, in a way that did not seem to invite further inquiry, so I left if at that. So the mystery continues.
My quest for a good pizza was more successful. This was a tasty pie.
The menu offers a choice of thickness for the crust. I didn't specify, but this was a pretty thin crust. If this was "regular," then "thin" must be really thin.
The underside was dark brown, with some surface crackling. It was crunchy underneath and along the edge, though it lacked the slightly charred quality of classic NY style pizza. The crunchiness along the lip was reminiscent of the "fried" crunch you get with some pizzas, though this was not a particularly greasy pie. Still, I think there was a bit of oil in there somewhere to give the crust this kind of crunch. The overall texture and flavor were all right, if not quite as bready as I would've liked.
As I'd hoped from the description, I enjoyed the flavor of this pie. It was not overly cheese-laden, like some white pizzas, but the mix of feta and mozzarella (not listed on the menu description, but I took it to be mozzarella) contrasted well with each other, and provided a good background for the other toppings. My biggest complaints are that the tomatoes were pale and flavorless (which is not unusual, when they're out of season) and that the olives were of the canned variety. They were OK, just not as flavorful as the "fresh" kind (I'm not sure if "fresh" is the right word, since all olives are cured in some way, but you get what I mean. The kind of olives you get at the olive bar in the supermarket.)
Still, all in all this was a pretty decent pizza, on a pretty decent crust. There was room for improvement, but I had no major complaints. I'm still wondering about that "35 years" claim, but this was good enough to get a B from me.
Paradiso Pizza,  200 Park Point Drive, Suite #105, Henrietta 14623
Mon. - Thu. 11 a.m. - 11 p.m., Fri. - Sat. 11 a.m. - midnight, Sun. noon - 9 p.m.

Stone Oven Pizza, RIT

College campuses aren't typically places I would go looking for pizza, but after hearing that RIT had a place called "Stone Oven Pizza," I thought it might be worth checking out.
Clearly the days of the dining hall as the place to eat on-campus are long gone. Today it's all about choices, and RIT offers students a dizzying array of options, including the aforementioned Stone Oven.
While it's nice to have choices and all, that doesn't mean much if the food's no good. So how's the pizza?
I got a cheese slice and a Margherita slice, which was one of specialty slices of the day. They were baked in what looked, at first glance, like a wood-fired oven, but it appeared to me that the flame inside was simply a gas flame.
The crust on both slices was thin, with an underside that was, sadly, crisscrossed with screen marks. I say "sadly" because it seems to me that baking the pizza on a screen, while it might be convenient, is not apt to give you as crisp a crust as baking it right on the floor of that nice-looking stone oven. And sure enough, the underside on these was firm, but not what I would call crisp, and the crust was a bit chewy. There were a few spots underneath that were nearly charred, but mostly they were just a mottled brown.

The cheese slice was covered with a fairly thick blanket of mozzarella. It was a little oily on top. The moderately-applied sauce had a thick consistency and a middle-of-the-road flavor, neither too sweet, salty or herbal. The puffy edge of the crust was OK, with some bready flavor, but not particularly noteworthy.
The Margherita was, well, not what I would call a Margherita. Not to get hung up on labels, but if you'd asked me what kind of pizza it was, I wouldn't have guessed that it was a Margherita.
Some chunky tomatoes were interspersed with what appeared to be fresh mozzarella, though the cheese seemed a bit dried out and not as creamy as it could've been.
That was fine, but where was the basil? I'm not sure that I've ever had a Margherita without some fresh basil on it. This simply had what flakes of what I took to be dried, crushed basil.
Semantics aside, this was pretty tasty. The underside, though still not crisp, was a bit more blackened than the cheese slice, and had some pleasant toasty flavor notes. I picked up a pronounced aroma of garlic, while on the palate, there was a tangy saltiness from the cheese, which played nicely off the sweetness of the tomatoes. To paraphrase Shakespeare, a Margherita by any other name would taste just as good, and whether this deserved that moniker or not, it was, for me, definitely the better of the two slices.
I didn't get a menu - I'm not sure that they had any - but you can get an idea of the offerings at SOP and its neighbors at the Commons here. Here's a campus map, if have no idea where the Commons is (I didn't).
Some time ago, RIT's Dining Services vowed to come up with "Rochester's Best Pizza." I'm not sure if this is supposed to be it, or if they're still in the laboratory working on it. Either way, I'd say they've still got some work to do, but this wasn't bad pizza. I wouldn't go out of my way to get it, but if I were on campus and hungry, there's a good chance I'd head to Stone Oven. I'll give it a B-.

Stone Oven Pizza & Pasta Cucina, at the Commons, RIT campus.
Mon. - Fri. 11 a.m. - midnight, Sat. & Sun. noon - midnight.

Lucci's, East River Rd.

Lucci's is a relatively new place - new to me, anyway, as I only learned of its existence a few weeks ago - near RIT.  That means that RIT students now have three pizzerias within a short distance of the campus, the other two being Sylvio's and Paradiso (which is actually on campus). And supposedly, RIT's Food Services department is in the process of revamping its own pizza to try to make it more competitive with outside vendors. So in terms of the sheer number of choices, at least, RIT students should consider themselves fortunate, where pizza's concerned.
I grabbed a couple of pepperoni slices recently. They were quite thin, with a screen baked underside that was fairly pale, just a bit sooty, and dry to the touch but not very crisp. The crust had a chewy texture that made it more suitable for tearing off a mouthful at a time, rather than biting cleanly through. It was a pliable crust, though, and the slices were easily foldable.
Topside, both slices were quite greasy, mostly, I assume, from the pepperoni. These were what I'll call “2 napkin” slices, meaning that it took two napkins apiece to sop up the layer of grease on each one.
The sauce was noticeably, though not liberally, applied, and had a slightly sweet flavor. A light dusting of dried herbs was visible, mixed in with the sauce.
The cheese was applied somewhat thinly, though in good balance with the thin crust. There were some bare, cheeseless areas along the outer edge, which was formed into a thin lip. The dough had bubbled in a couple of spots along the edge, creating some large pockets of air.
Lucci's available pizza toppings are pretty basic, but they do offer seven specialty pizzas, including a "monster" (essentially a garbage plate pizza) and what they call a Sicilian, which is described as topped with Italian olives, mushrooms, hot peppers and cheese. Sounds good (except for the mushrooms - I don't like mushrooms), but can we get a definition of "Sicilian" pizza? I've seen all sorts of pizzas around here going by the name Sicilian, that don't fit the profile of what I always thought of as Sicilian pizza.
The non-pizza part of the menu includes wings, hot and cold subs, burgers, hots, chicken dinners, seafood and fish, pasta, "plates," salads, soup, sides, and a few breakfast items (including breakfast pizza) as well. And since it's in a convenience store, you can also pick up basic groceries, beer, tobacco, and of course Lotto tickets.
As far as the pizza's concerned, this was not bad, not great. All three of the basic components - crust, sauce and cheese - were well integrated with each other, and generally it tasted pretty good. But the crust seemed a bit undercooked and lacking in crispness. It may have been the first pizza of the day when I went there, and sometimes that can be tricky because the ovens may not be quite up to full temp, I don't know.
Based on my limited experience, if I were on campus and wanted pizza, I might go to Lucci's, especially if I wanted to pick up some other stuff too. For a convenient, decent NY style slice, I'd probably walk over to Paradiso, and if I wanted a monster slice or to go somewhere with a bar, I'd head to Sylvio's. Now let's wait and see what RIT Food Services can come up with. In the meantime, Lucci's gets a C+ from me.
Lucci’s Pizza & Grill, 3289 East River Rd. 292-6780
Mon. - Fri. 8:00 a.m. - 9:00 p.m., Sat. 9:00 a.m.- 10:00 p.m., Sun. 10:00 a.m. - 8:00 p.m.

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.