Pie Works

My wife and I had an appointment after work on Friday afternoon that ran a little long. When we phoned home at the end of the appointment, son #1 answered and quickly offered that we would be much better parents if we arrived home with pizza. The dinner we'd planned for that night wasn't going to be fancy, and the ingredients would keep, so we gave in to the nudge. Because the appointment had taken us into northwest Greensboro, we decided to grab two take-out pizzas from Pie Works at 3700 Lawndale Drive (coupon in the ADVG "casual dining section).

I should say up front that I'm deeply and passionately ambivalent about chain pizza restaurants. There's nothing especially wrong with them, but they typically fall far enough down in the rank orderings of places to eat that we seldom find ourselves in one. Pie Works is such a chain, and I'm still ambivalent.

We hadn't been in a Pie Works before and weren't familiar with the menu. Pie Works' claim to fame is "pizza by design," which means that you can select every single one of the ingredients--crust, sauce, cheese, and toppings. They also have several pages of recipe pizzas.

Being a little tired and having come to the restaurant to avoid our domestic responsibilities, we were now confronted with the need to work out pizza recipes start to finish.

We're simple folk and have two standard orders: regular cheese pizza and a sausage and mushroom pizza. Son #1 occasionally tries to drag us toward the more exotic, like chicken or artichoke, but he wasn't along and would just have to put up with the standards.

My wife spotted a CheeseWorks pizza on the menu. She asked the girl at the order desk whether the pizza came with sauce and was assured that it did. Unfortunately, this turned out to be misleading. When we got the pizza home, we weren't able to detect any sauce. Mind you, I'm not saying that the sauce wasn't there. Like those senior Pentagon sources, I can neither confirm or deny its existence. Either way, the pizza was very dry.

We ordered the sausage and mushroom pizza from the design-your-own menu and got that with regular crust, tomato sauce, mozzarella and provolone cheeses, spicy Italian sausage, and fresh mushrooms (there were actually other sausage and mushroom choices). This pizza turned out closer to what we expected and better, having among other things, sauce.

Both pizzas had ample crust, about the same thickness as a Papa John's pizza or a Pizza Hut hand-tossed. Both also had ample crust bubbles and the accompanying bubble bald spots (yo, cooks, you can lance those things while they're in the oven).

Son #1 was very positive both about the pizzas and about our performance as parents. Son #2 was also positive, comparing the pizzas favorably to Elizabeth's and Napoli, while my wife rates them below that. I remain stubbornly, doggedly, and fiercely ambivalent.

With another nudge, we'll probably go back and eat in.