Even More Pizza On The Road

The Eat All the Pizza in Batavia mission continued last week and unfortunately, there are no shining stars to report on this week….sigh. But these bad experiences make the good experiences even better. This trip I wanted to hit Marks and Main Street Pizza.

First up was Mark’s. I skipped lunch and pulled up to Mark’s on the way to the hotel. Turns out Mark’s is a regional chain. Twenty five locations.

I ordered a pepperoni pizza. They are cooking on screens in an air impingement oven (conveyor deck). It looked like the oven was set at 460 degrees. I timed the bake of my pizza at just under 10 minutes. I think the people behind the counter took my watching them as impatience, but I was just trying to see anything that was going on behind the scenes. I can say, there was a college age guy making subs and if he continues to cut sub rolls that way (holding the bread while making large, fast slices with a bread knife aimed at his hand), he will be getting stitches at some point in the not too distant future. I watched the dough being stretched. Instead of an edge stretch where the rim of the crust is formed early in the dough stretching, the dough was stretched and then the rim was kind of crimped. In the end, it looked normal.

The crust was light, airy and the crisp bottom had a little coating of uncooked bench flour (bottom picture came out blurry). The crust was also completely flavorless. It made me think of some cheese bread/sticks I've seen on the pizza forum. The sauce wasn’t very good and there was too much of it. The cheese and pepperoni slide. The cheese was also a bit watery. The pepperoni was your standard, nothing special flat pepperoni. The pizza did get a little bit better with age. As everything cooled to room temperature, the toppings and cheese stopped sliding but this was not good pizza. Recently, a different location of Mark’s was recently reviewed by SexySlices – an Instagram reviewer on a mission to review a different Buffalo Style pizza place each week. They gave Mark’s a solid B. If this is an above average example of Buffalo Style pizza, I might be done trying to look into the style.

But wait, it gets worse. So much worse.

For dinner, I met my friend Kevin (from heaven) and we headed out to Main Street Pizza Company. 

We went over the menu and decided to try a small pepperoni pizza and one of their grilled pizzas too. I’m reluctant to beat up the restaurant too badly. Service was very friendly. It was nice inside. They had an inexpensive house wine. The menu was diverse. They were running a tripe special. But the pizza…I hated everything about the regular pizza.

The regular pizza was cooked on a screen in what I would guess is conveyor belt oven similar to Mark’s and the appearance of the pizza was also very similar to Mark’s. The crust…I think you might be able to do better with a Boboli shell from a supermarket. The sauce was painfully sweet. Just thick tomato fortified with a shit-ton of sugar. We each only had one slice of the regular pizza. Neither one of us wanted another. I got the leftovers to go trying to be polite but those two slices were all that got eaten.

The grilled pizza had the same dough rolled thin, way too much the same sauce, a few sad pieces of rubbery fresh mozzarella and some roughly torn basil leaves. C’mon, that’s a sad looking pizza, right?

That grilled blob was $11.95. Kevin asked, "Is this going to be featured on the world famous Jon In Albany Blog?" Yes, Kevin. It is.

I ate one slice, Kevin had 2 of the grilled, more I think because he was a little hungry than the quality of the pizza. People seemed to like the Chicago Deep Dish there. We saw one as we left. It looked like the same pizza with the dough in a different shape. If I were ever to make it back to Main Street Pizza, I’d try some of the other things they had on the menu that looked like they could be interesting but I’d stay away from the menu items that had pizza dough. They had calzones and "subzonis" which sound kind of stromboli-ish.

After dinner, Kevin and I headed next door to the Eli Fish Brewing Company. It’s a really nice space with 20 beers on tap. If they weren’t brewed there, they were brewed somewhere else in New York. We talked with someone that works in the kitchen at a place called O’Leary’s that is just around the corner. Sounded like a nice restaurant. Maybe I can get to O’Leary’s next time. There is only 1 more pizza place to visit and then I will be able to compile my Batavia Pizza Power Rankings. I'm not optimistic about the last place. People at Eli Fish made "why would you go there?" faces when I mentioned it, but a mission is a mission. I'm going.