The Great Pizza Adventure #5 - Mama Mia

So far it's been all chain pizzas but that ends today.

Mama Mia's pizza... I've seen your shop for years, but just barely.  It's at the end of a small strip mall close to the end of civilization, next to a tattoo shop or something like that.  I figured it must be really good in order to have survived all these years so my hopes were high.  

And so it was, on the day that I was working on redoing a bathroom, that I took a break to brave the roads of Fort Wayne.  Ordering was easy.  They have a website but you can't order from it.  Nope, you call them up like a human.  They were efficient and friendly.  15-20 minutes.  That's standard.

The store was also pretty standard.  No seating (or maybe there is limited seating but it's been removed due to THE TIMES WE ARE IN), a glass-fronted refrigerator unit full of beverages, a counter spanned the width of the store, a few outdated papers on the walls.  Standard.  The two people I interacted with were very friendly, so much so that I might have actually seen a smile through the facemask.

$6.99 for a one-topping 14" large.  Here, take a look:

I ordered my usual half and half, which they cut reasonably well AND gave me a table for my action figures.  The toppings are under a sufficient amount of cheese so I couldn't count the pepperonis.

True to their word, this pie is a full 14 inches!  So far they're an honest shop!  It also weighed 35.5 oz, for those of you who care about those things.

My first bite was full of antici... pation (sorry).  The crust was not floppy but it wasn't even close to crisp.  It also wasn't doughy or flavorful.  It was just... there to hold the toppings.  Bummer.

The sauce didn't have a lot of character either.  Neither did the cheese.  It was good, mind you, just not the really, really good I was hoping for from a privately owned pizzeria.

 

But how about those toppings?  I'd say they fall in the "extremely generous" category.  Sure, the cheese is merely adequate, but there was A LOT of sausage.  As for pepperoni, I just had to peel back the top to confirm my suspicions... WALL TO WALL PEPPERONI!  I'm going to guess that a full pepperoni pizza would have about 45 of them bad boys on here.  They were of average thickness and flavor-wise we acceptable.

In fact, words like "standard" and "acceptable" and "okay" kept coming to my mind while eating.  It's a decent pizza but in terms of flavor it barely hits a 6.  It reminded me a lot of a Raimondo pizza but without the gobs of high-quality cheese.  

So how about those stats?

Weight: 35.5 oz

Diameter: 14" 

Cost: $7.55

Service:8

Crust:5

Sauce:5

Toppings: 10 (quantity) + 5 (flavor) / 2 =7.5

Value: 10 (21 cents per ounce) / 4.9 cents per square inch

                  Overall Score:7.1

                  Flavor Score: 5.0

For now Marcos is still in the lead with 7.4.  It's too bad this place doesn't have a better crust or access to salt and spices.  I'm kinda bummed because "just okay" wasn't what I was hoping for from a private pizza place.  But I've shed my tears and I'm over it.  I'm letting it go...