Not to be confused with Reservoir Tavern in Boonton, this is “Reservoir” in South Orange, which serves a medium bar pie style pizza instead of the traditional 16” style. The first thing that jumped out at me, and you can see it clearly in the picture…Woah, Greased Lightnin’! There is a swimming pool of oil drowning the ingredients of this pizza. Just a vat of grease completely engulfing the surface of the pie. I wasn’t sure if they dumped a can of tomato soup in a pizza dough bread bowl by accident. I tried to eat the slices that were the most dry first; and believe it or not, they were very good. While this pizza is the size of a bar pie in diameter, it’s definitely thicker and has looser cheese than most bar pies in which the cheese is super tight. I consider this to be more of a “Tavern style” pizza, which is a division of the bar pie category. The dough is very tasty with a firmish undercarriage, mostly soft overall, fantastically crispy and flavorful crust, rich & buttery, easily the star of the pizza. The sauce is slightly more bitter than sweet, tough to navigate due to the abundance of grease. Most of the cheese is completely submerged in oil, extremely loose, liquidy, sloppy & salty. You can either use 67 napkins to dab the grease or just let it congeal after it cools so it doesn’t drip down your chin with each bite. All of the ingredients are very good, particularly the outstanding crust; but the “reservoir” of greasy oil sinks the overall score. I would love to try a pie that wasn’t completely overwhelmed by oil; I believe it would score in the low-to-mid 8s. As it stands, 7.5 is an incredibly fair score considering the geyser; but this pizza is not worth breaking out in pimples or hardening your arteries over. Control the grease flow dramatically and we are probably talking about a travel pie.
