Tacconelli's Pizza

Philadelphia should really change its motto to: “city of difficult pizza ordering processes.” Add this to the list of pizzerias that don’t take walk-ins and don’t accept credit cards. In fact, you must call ahead several hours and reserve your dough; they actually run out of dough virtually every day, which is completely baffling to me. I called around 1pm on a Saturday to place an order for pickup and the best they could do was offer a half-cooked pie for pickup at 5:30, which made no sense why they could only offer it half-cooked. So I opted to dine in and reserve my dough; earliest they could take me was 8:30pm. I ordered one large cheese pizza at 8:35, they brought it out at 9:35. They only have one cook with one oven; it’s an incredibly slow process, so you must have patience. They do use an old school brick oven that was originally built over 100 years ago and was refurbished in 1992. All of that being said, they serve razor thin, super crispy, tremendously tasty pizza here. The dough is superb in both taste and texture. Thin like a bar pie, outstandingly crispy with a firm undercarriage, with seeds/crumbs underneath to prevent moisture buildup, zero flop and out of this world crunch. The crust is fairly thin with a dusting of flour instead of a nice char, but exquisitely crunchy nonetheless. The dough is a top notch base for the rest of the ingredients. The sauce & cheese are also thin, in perfect proportion to the dough, similar to bar pie style, but larger. The cheese is sharp and tight, much like a bar pie, with great flavor but surprisingly greasy, with a little more oily drip than I expected. The sauce is incredibly unique, truly one of a kind. The texture has the consistency of baked ketchup or BBQ sauce. Super sweet, sour, tangy & zesty, the flavor is very close to a mix of ketchup, BBQ sauce and pepper…kind of like you would find on a BBQ chicken pizza. Definitely an acquired taste, I could see this sauce being somewhat polarizing. The sauce kind of grew on me after an initial distaste; but I still don’t love it. I prefer a more traditional blend of pizza sauce. The textures and tastes of the dough and cheese are extraordinary; however, the sauce is the one component keeping this pie out of the legendary 9s. All in all, this is still a pizza worth making a pilgrimage for, certainly travel-worthy. But for me it’s probably one and done as I’m not a fan of all the hoops you have to jump through just to get your hands on a pizza pie here.