Critic's Review
Review 9/11/15
I drive by here a few times a week, and never see anyone inside. Machine pressed pizza doesn't seem as popular as they thought it would be. After "dining" at Agave next door, I swung by to check it out.
There are signs that this place is falling off the rails. Their website is now run by Delivery Dudes, The links in the embedded page don't work at all. Didn't anyone try it out? Their mobile site is a mangled mess. It shows that the people in charge have stopped paying attention.
Something really hilarious is that when you click "Menu" you get a Delivery Dudes embedded page with advertisements for OTHER RESTAURANTS! Imagine the concept; someone goes to you website at 10am, clicks on the menu link and instead of presenting your product, they get an ad for the restaurants nearby.
Funny stuff.
Review 9/11/15
I really didn't feel like a little pizza today, but it was time to try this place out. Although they also sell salads, I wasn't going to a place named Flash Fire Pizza and have a salad, only to endure the scorn of my readers.
Parking is in the rear; they have a rear entry unlike Burger 21. It's a good thing as walking around to the front would have been a pain. The bad thing about rear parking is that it's also where the garbage is, and where employees are hanging out and smoking. It's not a great start to see the bowels of a business before getting inside.
The interior of the place is typical of the newfangled fast casual restaurants; think BurgerFI. There's music playing at a fairly high volume. You go to the end and start the process of ordering your food.
They have a flyer on their facebook page with the tagline "$5.95 Cheese Pizza All Day Everyday"; except this tidbit doesn't appear on their menu, or on the blackboards with the menu at the restaurant. The girl who was taking the initial order didn't know about this either; she had to ask someone about it. Not a good start; it's clear that they prefer that you not know about this.
Unlike a real pizzeria, they use a pizza press to flatten the dough. It looks like a DoughPro. Everything here is engineered to allow low skilled workers to work the line.
The dough comes out of the press and the girl flattens it out with a little roller. She doesn't even form a crust; just rolls it out flat. Then she shuffles it over a dude who doesn't really ask what I want. Just "House Red OK? Mozzerella OK?" The picture on the flyer had fresh tomatoes and fresh basil on it, but I wasn't offered anything like that. Since this wasn't on the menu, I had no idea what my choices were. After putting the cheese on he motored it directly to the oven.
This was about checking out the pizza, and there's no way to do that better than by just getting sauce and cheese. I don't really like other kinds of cheese on a pizza.
A standard pie with toppings is $7.95, so it's $2 for toppings on a 10". So that's really no bargain. A 16" pizza is 2.5 times the size of a 10", so the regular pizza is the equivalent of $20 for a 16" pizza.
This place is like Blaze and Saladworks under 1 roof; no salad for me today.
Salad is $5.95 with $1 extra for cheese and $1 extra for meat; I assume it's $1 for each cheese or meat. They also have some specialty salads without prices; most of them include cheese and/or meat, so I guess they cost more than $5.95. It's all very murky.
The toppings didn't look too amazing. The red onions were cut pretty thick. I wasn't sure what some of the items were.
I grabbed a bottle of water and watched them put my pizza into the oven. $8.10 for the pizza and the water.
They have fresh herbs all over the place, which is interesting but I don't really get it. Fresh herbs don't go in salad, and other than basil, fresh herbs don't go on pizza.
They give you a number that you clip onto the thing on your table, and you wait for your food. It's all very familiar. They have wireless that's password protected; I asked a dude what the password was, and he said he didn't know. He said I could ask the guy at the next table who was the owner; I was getting a good enough xfinity wireless signal so I didn't ask him for it.
The pizza was delivered in 5 minutes.
I'm pretty ticked off about the focus on this pic, but you get the idea. A pretty fast foodish looking pizza. The cheese wasn't quite cooked long enough. What I don't like about small pizzas is that the slices are ridiculous; like 2 bites and you're done.
The crust was pretty good, but I didn't like the sauce. Too pungent, and too overpowered with spices. Spices in pizza sauce should compliment the tomatoes; here the spices overpowered them.
I got the idea to fix the pizza but adding some oregano, but they don't have dried oregano. They offered me some fresh oregano, but that would have been a bad idea. Fresh oregano has a very strong taste,and I didn't want that on the pizza.
This pizza isn't good enough to eat without topping. Loading it up with stuff will make the sauce and cheese less important.
Conclusion
Flash Fire Pizza seems to be a collection of gimmicky concepts that don't really fit together. While the oven has a visible fire, the temperature is only 530 degrees, which is about the same temperature as a commercial deck pizza oven. Little Ceasars meets Salad Creations? Just give me an 18" pie in a cardboard box please.
As a NYer, my idea of pizza may be a bit different; the pizza you got from your neighborhood pizzeria had people behind it, and the recipes often had generations of history. Flash Fire is corporate; the owner sits in the back with his spreadsheet trying to figure out how to make more money; he couldn't care less whether his customers were enjoying the experience. I'd rather go to a pizzeria and get a couple of real slices, to be honest.
They use a pizza press at California Pizza Kitchen, and I've never had a pizza there. To me, this is no better than making a pizza at home. It may be really tasty, but it's not a pizza.
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