focaccino-no-no

if your block is like mine, you've probably seen one or thirty of these in the past week or so:

looking at the menu, with the times square clip art photo and the "slick" graphics, my husband was sure that it was a chain; i wasn't so convinced. i checked their website, and my woman's intuition was right: poor design choices notwithstanding, this was a one-off business.

anyway, as it seems like mainly a order-in kind of place, i felt that i could do a review by calling for delivery and not feel like a slacker....

i called up, and it took me five redials to not get a busy signal, which made me first think "wow, they must be really busy, the food must be great!" and then think "busy signal?? what is this, 1988?".

when i finally got through i spoke to a very nice worker, who took my order for a personal-size plain pizza on whole grain dough and a family-size goat cheese focaccia and was totally accomodating when i asked to substitute grilled zucchini for the grilled eggplant on the focaccia. i was pretty psyched that they offered whole grain crust, it makes me feel like a better mother to order a whole grain pizza.

it arrived (quickly, bonus points), and we cracked open the boxes. the pizza looked fine...

...but wasn't a hit with any member of the family. the little guy thought the sauce was too spicy, we both thought it was too sweet. the whole wheat crust, though, was pretty good.

then we opened the big box to check out the focaccia:

i've eaten a fair amount of focaccia. i've even made focaccia. and every focaccia i've ever met before has looked...not like that. they've been at least 1/2-inch thick, doughy. so after staring at the thing in the box for a couple minutes, i decided that there must have been a mistake—maybe they thought i ordered a goat cheese pizza? also, what was up with the sundried tomatoes? i had a bite: it was dry and flavorless. so i gave them a call. i got the same very nice guy, who remembered me. he couldn't really answer anything about the sundried tomatoes, but told me that the thin dough was just "how they make it", that their focaccia was "pretty much like a pizza dough." which, okay, fine, if that's how they want to make their "focaccia", that's their prerogative. i just won't ever be ordering it again.