Austin Pizza Company - A Tale Of Two Pizzas

So, I won't usually pass judgment, good or bad, on a restaurant until I have eaten there at least twice - unless it's just downright crappy, and even then I will allow for the chance that I ordered the wrong thing off the menu. (Many restaurants have one or two dishes that are prepared perfectly, and several more that are not - which means, in my world, that you should go to that restaurant when you want either of those two dishes and avoid it otherwise.) Why? Because even a single experience, good or bad, isn't the measure of a restaurant. The measure of a restaurant is consistency - period. You produce consistently good or even great food, and you're a good restaurant. You have a good night here and there, and you're not - it's very simple.

So, having eaten at Austin Pizza Company twice now, I've contracted the minimum number of experiences to render my opinion - and while it rarely is so, in this case, the minimum will be enough. First - the good, which happened to be the first visit. Ordered, of course, the pepperoni pizza - the gold standard when it comes to pizza. Yes, there are many options in pizza, there are flourishes both new and traditional, there are crust variations, sauce variations and, of course, a variety of ingredients, but pepperoni pizza is both the simplest and the most telling when it comes to the form. Crust, sauce, cheese, meat of an indeterminate and delicious origin. All of the elements come into play, and in a manner that allows the eater (me, for instance) both to admire each individually, and evaluate how well balanced they are against one another.

The first pepperoni pizza from Austin Pizza Company was good - not great, but good. Crust was crisp, slightly carbonized (which I like), cheese was present but not overwhelmingly so, sauce sweet, tangy with a slight spice and the pepperoni generous and crisped nicely at the edges for that oh-so-important carmelized flavor.

Next, the bad, which came the second time: crust was slightly flabby, thicker than previously and not fully cooked, sauce was the same, cheese too generous and pepperoni...well, here's the rub, pepperoni was under the cheese. Under it. Where last time it had been on top. Picky of me to care? Quibbling? Maybe, but it's a difference, and a big one. Think of this - pepperoni curling, slightly browned, fat rendered in pearly sequins on top, or pepperoni lurking saturated and soggy with tomato sauce somewhere under a stifling blanket of cheese; the difference is visual, textural and victual. It's a big difference.

Most importantly to this my inaugural post, however, is quite simply that it is a difference - and this breaks a restaurant, in this case, the Austin Pizza Company. If I order a pepperoni pizza and get the cook du jour's "idea" of what might be good that day (or maybe the result of his/her inattention due to, oh I don't know, ingestion of horse-threatening quantities of some or other narcotizing substance), then I'm basically gambling. And while there are certain restaurants where this kind of gamble is considered part of the territory, where amus bouches of Mexican vanilla foam, exotic fish cheeks, and, say, an unexploded 22 cartridge are "part of the experience," most restaurants do not seek to challenge us in this fashion, and definitely not a place like Austin Pizza Company.

Which brings me to the point of this first post - that in eating out, I look for places that offer good food consistently. Ambition and atmosphere are graded on a curve; I'm probably not expecting a burger in a black-tie joint or a $70 entree on a paper plate, but if either are really, really good, I'll probably be happy. What I do want is a restaurant that knows what it is doing, whether that's providing a challenge, or providing the same pepperoni pizza every time I order it.

Which means, to return to Austin Pizza Company, that in spite of the numerous Chronicle awards cheaply framed and tacked crookedly to a grimy wall next to the register, in spite of the perfectly nice if somewhat inefficient counterperson (really, does it take six trips to the back to get a pizza, wings and salad?), in spite of its being, quite literally, right around the corner - where we'd always like to have a good, solid pizza joint - and when even that's too far, that it delivers; in spite of all of this, it doesn't make the grade. Two different pepperoni pizzas are all it takes to tell me that.