While I usually do not go very in depth on my reviews, I usually like to stick to the highlights, brevity is the soul of wit etc. etc., but today it feels warranted.
Firstly, I counted about 10 reviews giving this place a 9.2+ with the review being the only one on the account, that is some BS, if the owner is trying to inflate the score through false reviews rather than the product, he does not deserve anyone's business.
I wanted to like this place because of the story, and had wanted to try for a while. I ordered the pie for pick up and I was the only one there. The guys inside were super nice, and made conversation with me, I talked with them about how they made their sauce etc. yet despite the cordiality I cannot overlook the true score of this pizza.
This pizza is not an 8. It is certainly not an 8 based on a New York scale, but it is not even an 8 in Philly. Tell me honestly, does it look like an 8 to you? Not unless you like swimming in those pools of oil.
Firstly, it was cooked well, gas oven, good undercarriage. But there was nothing special about this dough, proofed and cooked well, but no real flavor in the dough, and did not taste of anything other than usual quality from a local pizza place.
The ratios of sauce to cheese were all out of whack. The sauce was a cooked sauce, they told me. Cooking a sauce starts with a base of oil unlike a raw sauce, and aggregating that oil with the surplus oil of the cheese leads to far too much and an almost dominos / ellios taste. Secondly, they cook the sauce with basil. Basil infuses flavor into the sauce as it cooks, but the leaves become bitter as they stew, and they then left these leaves under the sauce, leading to a few nasty and bitter bites. They cooked the sauce, I assume, for extra flavor within it, but it was totally overshadowed by the copious amounts of strong cheese.
There is a reason most elite pizza places use only a blend of whole milk low moisture mozzarella and then a finish of parm / grana / or pecornio, as mozzarella is a blander cheese that melts well, and the finisher gives a nice salty kick. Adding provolone into the mix as they do here completely throws off the balance of the other two cheeses, it makes it an intense flavor that scarcely allows you to taste the cooked sauce underneath. There is no benefit of the provolone on pizza, no one does it for that reason, being different for different's sake oft leads to bad results.
I leave this analysis because I do think this pizza has potential to be a high 7s low 8s spot, but as it stands its nowhere close. I would not go out of my way for this pizza, without the fake reviews the overall score would be in the 7s likely. It is up to the owner to make the changes to get this into the 8s, I hope he does, but I am worried he is most likely indignant and bittered in his ways. Time will only tell, Good luck to The Angelo Pizza.
