My usual pizza place changed their crust and sauce and the pizza is just not same so I am now in the market for a new pizza joint to frequent. This happens all too often. You find something you really like and for some reason there are changes made… who in their right mind messes with a winning product?
Anyway, in my search for a new pizza I decided to try Gabriel’s. Gabriel’s is a Ottawa pizza chain that seems to be on every street. Naturally the assumption has to be that these guys are great… wrong…they are not great they are just every where. I ordered a 4 topping pizza, pepperoni, onion, mushrooms, and garlic. MMMMM garlic. But wait they do not offer garlic. I asked the lady if garlic was an unusual request and she said well no, its fairly common. My next reply was, “well, if its common why are you not offering it?”. Turns out that the corporate big wigs making the choices have not yet chosen garlic as a topping. So, I ordered my pizza and it came to 23 and change for a large. When I got to the store to pick it up I was only charged $21. I am not sure if the discount was an error or a bribe to come back regardless of the garlic choice for a topping being absent.
Now for the important thing… was the pizza any good? Well, it was average. The crust was thick and doughy and I like thin crusts. The sauce was very nice and in my opinion the sauce counts for about 50% of a pizza’s quality. These guys are great for cheese lovers. My pizza had the amount of cheese that you would get for ordering it as an extra topping. Myself, I do not like my pizza buried under a think layer of bland mozzarella cheese. I find that it distracts from all of the other flavours. The other thing that I notices was that the pepperoni were thrown on in a hurry because they were actually folded and bunched up. The mushrooms where almost non existant and the onions where not diced but strown on in long strings.
The pizza was just average… nothing special. I think I could make a better one here at home. I will continue my search for the perfect pizza over the next few months. The next one better have garlic as a topping or I will be moving to the next one without even ordering. Once you have tried garlic on your pizza you will never go without it.
So… 2 rules for pizza joints.
1. Don’t mess with a good thing.
2. Offer garlic as a topping.
Stephen Richardson
Canada Food Critic 