Critic's Review
The Millenial entrepreneur class continues to try to kill real pizza with Quick Serve fast food pizza. Pizzafire is an Ohio operation with 3 locations in FL, one in NY and 1 in Houston. I've tried Blaze, Midici and already closed FlashFire and Pieology, and yet-another, Pizza Rev, will be opening on Las Olas shortly. I've been wanting to try 1000 degree in Coral Springs but I haven't been motivated to drag myself out there yet. Plantation was the compromise.
Between a ridiculous rainstorm that I hit on 595 and the ridiculous traffic on University it took me way longer to get here than I anticipated. This shopping center is sort of on it's own little island (not directly connected to The Fountains; but I finally made my way through.
I sat outside for a few minutes to check their website; their big promotion this month is The Angry Hawaiian; a "pizza" with pineapple and hot sauce. Good Grief.
There's very little foot traffic in this center; a BGR franchise closed up in short order at this location most recently. I walked into the place at 1:52pm.
The lunch special seemed reasonable; $9 for a "personal" pizza, a side and a drink. I didn't see "Personal Size" on the menu. They all seem personal size to me.
So when I got to the counter I ask about the special and the guy tells me that the special is the 8" Neapolitan and the mid size is 10". That's not what the menu says, which touts 10", 11" and 14" pizzas. No sense arguing, the special gives you 2 toppings so I ordered pepperoni and meatball; I also got a side salad with blue cheese dressing.
It takes 2 to make a pizza. The entire trick of these franchise pizza places is the oven; here they claim "brick oven" pizza. It's a big fancy oven.
The place was incredibly dead for lunch hour; There was one dude and a family of 3 (2 kids, kids eat free on Wednesdays) which makes you wonder how these places can survive.
"drinks" are generic; they just have a freestyle machine which offers flavored iced tea; one of the flavors is lemon but they have no fresh lemon available.
No numbers or beepers needed here in the small room. You sit down with your drink and salad and wait for them to deliver your pizza.
Music here is geared towards kids with "Move to Miami" and Skrillez & Diplo feat polluting the airwaves.
The dine-in salad bowl is the same as the take out; it's a bit awkward trying to eat a salad of of the little container. The tomatoes were very fast foodish; but overall the salad was ok.
The pizza came out in 5 minutes. They say this is "authentic Neapolitan" but it looked a lot different than the Midici authentic version. This was just a regular pizza; I'd say NY style but you'll never get a pizza this small in NY.
I didn't have a ruler with me, so I can't say exactly how big the pizza was.
The pizza was OK; nothing good or bad about it. Meatballs usually aren't crumbled; the Italian guys slice the meatballs but here they do it differently.
The Math Problem
Here's the problem with small pizza, if you know math. An 8" pizza is 1/4 the size of a 16" pizza, so an 8" pizza is the same size at 2 slices, with more crust. Do you think that $7.99 for 2 slices is a good deal? If I can get 2 slices of traditional pizza and a drink for $5, why would I want this?
Conclusion
This place is the same as Blaze; a pizza franchise run by people who probably don't know too much about pizza. While the dining room is nicer than a lot of pizzerias; the music stinks and it's still not all that comfortable.
The cost of these franchises is excessive; a Blaze costs 400-900K and Pizzafire $300-500K; and then you get to pay them 7% of your sales. The franchisor is supposed to do their marketing for them, but they do a terrible job. They probably just buy some ads on Yelp and Facebook to claim they're helping; I remember when Mellow Mushroom opened (another pizza franchise that has closed in Fort Lauderdale), they didn't even have the menu on their website for a month and showed them as "coming soon" weeks after they were open. They paid $36,000 a year for that kind of support?
The real problem is that this isn't real pizza to me. Go to Anthony's, which isn't that great to me, and them come to one of these places, and you don't have to poll your crew which is better. It's not even close.
