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John's Incredible Pizza Company: Still incredible to some
| Wednesday, Apr 26 2006 8:05 PM
Last Updated: Thursday, Apr 27 2006 8:01 AM
It had been three long years since I visited John's Incredible Pizza Company on Rosedale Highway to gather material for this column. Since the children had outgrown the place, I thought it would be a fun nostalgia trip to take them back, with a friend each, of course.
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"No one goes there anymore," my daughter's friend said with the sort of accurate precision teens are known for. Once we got in the door and it was apparent that a mob scene was developing inside, she wisely amended her view. "Well, no one I know." Indeed. Most teens her age were working there, mopping up spills from younger siblings and muttering under their breath.
The visit to John's did touch off memories, including a past birthday party at the entertainment emporium which netted at least one memorable gift: a Furby.
"I finally threw it in the closet and hid it under a bunch of old clothes," she said. "The thing wouldn't shut up."
"You could get a lot for it now on eBay," said her younger brother, always looking for an angle.
Look, if you don't have children or grandchildren and don't want to overhear conversations like that, you have no earthly reason to dine at John's Incredible Pizza, but that didn't stop a lot of adults who were visiting during March Madness and watching great college basketball games on screens as big as the movie theaters. I was dazzled when I walked into the rooms with the projection TVs. I guess the other big attraction is that for $7.89 (adults) you aren't spending a lot on dinner -- about what you'd pay at Denny's or Home Town Buffet. The only problem is trying to get a table.
We visited early on a Saturday night, on our way to a Condors game. That way I didn't have to spend half a mortgage payment on tokens after we were done. A built-in excuse (by the way, you can buy 115 tokens with a meal for about $25, which is about what a family of three would pay for the food).
Though it was early, we could not find a place to sit in any of the rooms, even the little kids room, which my 13-year-old son assured me stunk from unattended diapers. I didn't pick up any repulsive odors, and would have been willing to sit in a janitor's closet at that point if it let me set my plate of pizza down.
Eventually a table for two opened up. We pounced on it. We had five, but we just ate in shifts. The others wandered about in a daze checking out the new video games or watching the people in the boogie bounce in the corner (at $2 the best value in the place). Near the end of our dining experience a table for eight opened up, and we were tempted to rent out the other three chairs. (Another big draw is the indoor race car track in part of the old Vans Skatepark, which also had long lines that night. We did it once before and it was a lot of fun.)
What's the food like? The salad bar has slipped -- I think the lettuce quality was weak and I couldn't find any raw spinach or romaine lettuce. The pizzas are the strength, if you want to call it that, and the variety and freshness is impressive. There's cheese, vegetarian, pepperoni, pepperoni with peanut butter (sensitive to peanut allergy victims, they've taken to spiking those pizzas with erect in-shell peanuts so you'll know exactly what you're eating), fiesta, jalapeno (with cheddar cheese), Canadian bacon, sausage and pepperoni, pineapple and sausage (yes, that's disgusting!) and an alfredo pizza which had a creamy garlic sauce under the cheese. The oddness of the crust was distracting. It wasn't particularly crisp on the bottom, but got soft and doughy as it rose during the baking process. The ideal pizza for a child, I guess.
I do give the staff props for keeping the product fresh and hot. The hardest working woman in the place was the one in the center of the pizza island who was pulling in fresh pizzas and putting them out on the buffet as soon as the space was available. The staff works to keep everything fresh.
There are also pastas and desserts, but the rest of my crew turned up their noses at the pastas insisting they weren't fresh enough. There was a corkscrew (fusilli) macaroni and cheese and bow-tie pasta with a pesto sauce. Spaghetti was available, with alfredo, marinara and meat sauces. Best item on the buffet is the breadsticks near the pasta, which surpass even the Olive Garden in quality.
Desserts are mostly forgettable: jello, no-bake cheesecake, cinnamon rolls, sugar and chocolate chip cookies and an apple cobbler that was so dull and lifeless it wouldn't pass muster in a school cafeteria. There is soft-serve ice cream, but one of the two machines had been trashed by customers (melting product, crushed cones) to the point that everyone was willing to wait patiently in line for the other machine to avoid contact with the disgusting one.
Believe me, "nobody goes there anymore" is not a phrase I would apply to John's Incredible Pizza unless to add the Yogi Berra qualifier, "It's too crowded." For a certain group of people, or a certain age, this is a fine dining experience.