Gino's Pizza Lynch Field - September 8, 2023

Gino's is sort of new to me. A friend of ours retired from West Penn Power in April, and she served Gino's at her retirement party where I tried a slice. It was OK, but it was plain cheese and had been sitting out for a while, so I felt like Gino's deserved more serious consideration.  

Gino's Pizza is a small delivery or carryout restaurant in Greensburg, across Route 119 from the Lynch Field recreational complex. For that reason alone, I'm guessing they get a lot of picnic and party orders. I'm not really certain how long they've been in business, because their website says "more than 20 years" and their paper carryout menu says "over 40 years." Maybe they've been around for 40 years but only 20 in that location? Who knows. 

Either way, I was expecting really tasty pizza because with all the competition in the area, it's hard to believe a bad pizza joint could stay in business for either 40 or 20 years.

I called and ordered two pies for pickup. The first a medium pizza with red sauce, sausage, and mushroom, and the second a medium white pizza with tomato and pepperoni. They told me it would be 35 minutes. The pizzas were ready on time (yay, Gino's!).

I got crazy hungry on the 20-minute drive home, cause they smelled amazing. However, my first impressions when I opened the boxes at home were mixed.

The traditional pizza looked sort of...generic. Like a cafeteria pizza; one step above frozen. The cheese looked thick and yummy, but the mushrooms were canned and the sausage was like sausage you've had on a million pizzas in your lifetime.

I could also tell that Chip was going to think it was too saucy (see all that sauce on the lower right?).

The white pizza, on the other hand, looked amazing. It didn't even look like the same type of crust - it was dusted with cornmeal, unlike the traditional pie. Like the other pizza, the amount of cheese looked perfect, and the entire thing was dotted with herbs (definitely oregano, and others I'm not sure of).

I took a slice of each, and started with the red pizza. I will say this: the crust was better than I was expecting. It had a slight sweetness, and a nice chewy texture. And the back crust was ever so slightly charred, which I love (the crust on the white pizza was also perfectly charred).

As I'd hoped, the cheese was delicious. However when I first bit into the slice, everything (the cheese and all the toppings) started to slide off in one big blob (you can see in the photo below that everything has shifted to the right). That was a bummer. And the sauce wasn't really savory or sweet - it was kind of bland. Avery described it perfectly when he said that all of the flavors blended together, but not in a good way. It was sort of muddled and meh.

The white pizza, on the other hand, was very good. The pepperoni was salty and delicious, the crust was done perfectly (I really couldn't tell whether it was a different kind of crust, but I think it's unlikely), and the herbs were perfect. All of the flavors were independently delicious but melded well, unlike the other pizza. My only complaint was that the tomatoes were sliced thick, which made it hard to bite through them. Either thinner slices or diced tomatoes would be preferable and would make this pizza perfect.

So Gino's was a mixed bag. Since it's 20 minutes away and we've got better pizza closer, I don't think we'll go back.