Like a Big Pizza Pie...

Today, we tried a pizza from Big Pie in the Sky, a restaurant spotlighted in a January episode of the Travel Channel show Man Vs. Food. They're only about 10 miles from here, and we had an errand to run that put us within a mile of the location, so we took advantage of a discount offer that had been given to us and ordered one of their 30" pizzas.

Now a friend of mine in LA swears that there's a place there that claims to offer a 50" pizza, and another friend said he had seen a restaurant that claimed to be the home of the 60" pizza, but I've never actually seen one of those--but I have seen a 30" pizza. I've seen it on the Man Vs. Food episode, and now I've seen it in real life.

Yes, it's big. Enormous. To an average adult, this seems as big as a large pizza must seem to a 4-year-old.

Having seen the show, I was hoping for a pizza like they served in that episode--loaded with ingredients on every square inch of the surface. What we got was a bit less grand. A fair amount of pepperoni and sausage combined with skimpy helpings of mushrooms, green pepper, and black olives. Lots of cheese, but it was a heavier, oilier cheese than most restaurants that are on my "best pizza" list. The ingredients stopped about 3/4" to 1" away from the edge on one side of the pizza, but a full 1 1/2" to 2" away on the other.

Even so, it's a lot of pizza. Over 700 square inches worth of pizza, in fact, contrasted with the just-over-250 square inches of pizza in an 18" Rosa's pizza or the 200 square inches of pizza in a Bellacino's 16" large. So even if you average 1 1/2" of crust all the way around and you throw that plain crust away, you still have 575" of pizza to consume.

Enough veggies to balance out the meats would have helped nice; the veggies were there almost as a footnote to the pizza rather than playing a vital role in the pizzavore experience. Better pizza sauce would have also been a good thing; their sauce is very weak and watery compared to the sauce at most other pizza restaurants, with minimal seasonings mixed in. And I prefer nothing but mozzarella on a pizza; it was obvious from the color and taste that there was some cheddar and (I'm pretty sure) romano mixed in with the mozzarella on the pizza we got. While they do offer those cheeses (along with smoked provolone) on their four-cheese pizza, they didn't say anything about it on the supreme--although to be fair, I should have noted that they did mention "fresh milk mozzarella" when it was the only cheese on a pizza, so I should have caught that and asked what their cheese mix was, then put in my all-mozzarella request.

So how was it? Good, but not great. I'm glad I tried it, but there was nothing there to convince me to abandon Rosa's (the great pizza restaurant right across the street from our neighborhood) or to make a special trip for a second helping. Still, I'm glad I tried it, just to be able to add it to the list of Atlanta-area pizza restaurants we've sampled.

(And no, we didn't eat it all. We ate two pieces each (had 'em cut it into 16 pieces, not eight), saved a piece each for possible future consumption, and gave the rest to Jared 'n' Jenny so that they could give us their thoughts on it. I figure he'll eat it before he reads this review, so my opinions here won't color his final report on their quality.)