PT's Pizza Palace - March 11, 2023

Even though we'd just eaten at a fish fry the night before, my complete disinterest in cooking  - along with the fact that Avery's girlfriend Steph was hanging out at the house - led us to try another pizzeria last night. I combed through my list of pizza places in the Harrison City area, only to discover that 2 we'd planned to try were now out of business. So we landed on PT's Pizza Palace.

Readers not from Western Pennsylvania may be surprised to learn that we do NOT have county school districts in this part of the world. Instead, many towns and townships have their own school districts. It's incredibly inefficient, but that's an issue for another day. The reason I bring this up is that PT in this region typically refers to Penn-Trafford, the adjoining school district so named because its catchment area includes both Penn Township and the town of Trafford. So while this pizza place isn't in our town or our school district, it's only 7ish miles from our house. 

PT's only offers carryout or delivery. You can see from the picture above that it's a tiny shop, surrounded by other businesses and holds just a counter and a kitchen. The menu was correspondingly small, offering a few specialty pizzas, a few subs, and some sides.

We called for carryout at 5:30, and ordered a medium sausage and mushroom pie, a medium pan pizza with pepperoni and bacon, 2 garden salads, and an order of cinnamon sticks. They indicated that it would be 35 or 40 minutes and the total was $42. We were pleasantly surprised by both.

Chip and I arrived at 6:06, and the food was ready. We were hopeful that a 15 minute drive meant that the food would be (mostly) hot by the time we got home, but there was no way of knowing how long it had been sitting before we got there.

Once home, we opened the boxes and were encouraged by the pizzas. The toppings looked plentiful and the cheese was nicely browned. They were warm but not hot.

There was again some disagreement on the pizza. Let's first talk about the crust. The regular crust was perfectly serviceable. There was nothing wrong with it, but there was also nothing that elevated it above most of the other pizza crust we've had in the last 10 weeks. We all agreed that the pan crust was much better. It was, however, a bit oilier than expected. I know that pan crust is specifically cooked in a deeper and oiled pan, but it wasn't as flavorful as I'd expected.

The pepperoni on the pan pizza was amazing. Some of the best I've ever had. But the bacon added nothing to the overall effect, and the pizza was light on cheese. Even so, Avery declared that this pizza might be his favorite so far (I feel like he's said that a couple of times already). The sauce was sweet, and while I'm not usually a fan of a sweeter sauce, this one worked really well. Especially with the pepperoni. 

The sausage and mushroom pizza had more cheese, and fresh mushrooms, but we all agreed that the sausage itself had very little flavor. And this pie was a little saucier; Chip showed us that his slice had several globs of sauce which then fell out on his plate as he bit into the slice. Yuck.

The salads were a tad bit disappointing. I'm not sure what I expected for $5. There was a fair amount of lettuce, as well as chunks of cucumber, pepper, and tomato. But there were far too many croutons, and the lettuce wasn't the freshest.

The cinnamon sticks smelled amazing. That's pretty much all we could smell in the car on the way home. 

I'm not a huge fan of cinnamon desserts but Chip, Avery, and Steph all tried one (after giggling at the box). 

What you may or may not know about Chip is that he has the sweet tooth of a typical six year old. So when something smells the way that these sticks did, he gets really excited about how sweet they're going to be. Unfortunately, he felt they were lacking in that department. All three tasters commented that the icing and the cinnamon seemed concentrated in the middle of each stick, leaving the ends a bit dry and just not that tasty. 

As a whole, I felt underwhelmed by PT's. The price was amazing, and the pan pizza was pretty darned good, so those factors may be enough for us to try it again (especially since they're only 15 minutes away). But they won't make it onto my list of top 5 best of the first quarter of 2023.