Thursday, May 26, 2011

Eddie's Pizza Truck

After my success at the Gorilla Cheese truck, I was eager to see what else the newly discovered world of food trucks had to offer me. After poking around Twitter, I was pleased to learn Eddie’s Pizza Truck would be parked in my vicinity the next day. I did some research on Yelp, and read some rather questionable reviews. In the back of my mind I thought, “It’s only pizza, how bad can they really screw this up?” After all, this is New York, so maybe the reviewers were just very particular about their pizza.


Friday morning arrived, and I purposely took the long way to work to do some preliminary investigating. Sure enough, Eddie’s Pizza Truck was parked exactly where Twitter promised me it would be. I spent more of my morning than is normal to admit polling friends on Gchat and internally debating whether I should give it a try. Finally, my curiosity was victorious and I told myself I might as well give it a go, at the very least to squelch any future time wasting on Gchat. As they say, knowledge is power, and I needed the knowledge of whether or not this pizza was something my taste buds would thank me for.

The first setback arose when I was tempted by the advertised special. I tried to place my order, but the gentleman in the truck, while extremely pleasant, informed me they were out of basil, so I could not get the special. Regardless of the fact that basil seems like a strange ingredient to be out of (it’s not particularly space consuming), you’d think they’d at least erase the special from the dry-erase board, to prevent future customers like me from having their hopes crushed. It seemed as though Eddie’s Pizza Truck could use a lesson from my old cross country coach. He was a strong advocate of reminding us of the 5 P’s: Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance. Perhaps Eddie’s should bring more ingredients for something they are advertising as a special.

After my initial disappointment, I settled for a plain pie with garlic. I figured that I should just go with the basics, because if they can’t get that right, then what can they get right? Moving along, my pizza was made relatively quickly, I re-entered my dungeon office, situated myself, and opened the box to see what awaited me. The Yelp reviews did not lie. This was VERY thin-crust pizza. One review I’d read compared it to a tortilla, and I would have to agree. The overall quality was mediocre at best. Sadly, there was nothing particularly distinguishable to note about this pizza. It wasn’t bad…but it wasn’t good either. Certainly edible, but nothing I’m jumping up and down to try again.

While the product was sub-par, I will give Eddie’s Pizza Truck credit for innovation and creativity. I do think the concept of personal pizzas freshly prepared and made to each customer’s order is worth some recognition. The idea is there, just not the product to back it up. Additionally, it was significantly less greasy than a regular slice. For once, I didn’t feel the need to lie down and let the pools of grease and globs of cheese rearrange themselves into various pockets of my stomach as I do after most other types of pizza.

That being said, I’m perplexed as to how these guys stay in business. This is a pizza truck in New York! They charged me $8 for a rather mundane version of pizza with no noteworthy aspects, and yet there are amazingly delicious pizza slices to be had for $2 or $3 on nearly every corner! While my curiosity is now satisfied, I think I’ll be sticking to the comfort of grease dripping down my hand and Italian men calling me “Mi amore,” (I’m talking about you, Ben’s Pizza), as opposed to a lack of basil and stomachaches. I learned my lesson: stomachaches are equivalent to quality.


http://www.eddiespizzany.com/truck.html

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