Pizza Marsala - December 27, 2022

Chip is heading to California January 4th through the 10th for his brother's birthday, so we decided to start early on our pizza adventures. We had lunch at the North Huntingdon location of Pizza Marsala the week before New Year's.

The restaurant is in a strip mall, but the strip mall is one of those unusual shopping centers that has not only a row of shops with exterior entrances, but also one interior corridor and that's where we found Pizza Marsala. 

We were the only people eating in, although the phone kept ringing the entire 50 minutes we were there - leading me to believe that they survive primarily on carryout and delivery. 

It was definitely a strip mall atmosphere, but the menu was extensive. In addition to many types of pizzas, they offer pasta, soups, salads, calzones, hoagies, burgers, and lots of appetizers. 

We ordered a medium sausage and mushroom pizza. At many of the pizza places we frequent a medium is a 12-inch pie, so we were surprised to see their medium at 14 inches. Their menu, by the way, provides both the pizza diameter AND the number of slices for each size. It drives me nuts when a pizza menu only tells you how many cuts you'll get in a given size. I mean, you can cut a 14-inch pizza into 4 cuts or 10...telling me how many slices tells me nothing about how much pizza you're gonna give me.

The pizza arrived quickly. We didn't time it but I'd guess it was about 15 minutes. When it arrived we were pleasantly surprised to see that it was not a super-saucy pizza. If there's one thing that both Chip and I agree on relative to pizza (actually, I think we agree on a lot relative to pizza), it's that you don't want to see sauce squishing out from under the cheese on either the sides or at the top. This was a delightfully low-sauce pizza. And the sauce was on the savory side, which I usually prefer, rather than being a sweet sauce.

The crust was thin, but it was a soft thin crust rather than a cracker-like crust. I like both, but Chip prefers the softer, foldable crust so he was happy when he pulled the first slice on to his plate. We were both pleasantly surprised to find that the cornicione (ha! I just learned that word), or outer crust, was as soft as the rest of the crust and very easy to chew. 

There was a good amount of both sausage and mushroom as well as cheese. According to the menu, the cheese is a provolone/mozzarella blend. It was very tasty and provided just enough gooey goodness without being overpowering. The mushrooms were chopped small so I wasn't certain they were fresh rather than canned, but I'm fairly sure that they were fresh.

The sausage was, for me, the only downfall for the pizza (but only a slight one). Western PA pizza joints often use sausage with a little bite. I'm not talking super spicy Italian sausage, but definitely a little more kick than your average Jimmy Dean or Bob Evans offering. Usually the kick doesn't bother me, but I found the heat just a half a degree too high for me to declare this an excellent pizza. It was the dominant flavor in my mouth after finishing a slice. A leftover piece reheated the next day still had the burn, which diminished my enjoyment of the leftovers.

I don't intend to rate the pizza restaurants we try - developing a rating system would require far more time and motivation than I seem to have. But I would definitely recommend Pizza Marsala for the quality of its ingredients, the ratio of cheese to sauce to toppings, the excellent crust, and good prices. Next time I'll just avoid the cured meats.