The Pizza Experience

Friday night is date night - thanks to some good friends of ours, the Petersons, in MN. This is time Jack and I specifically set aside each week to be together and reconnect after a long work week. Lately, we have been using our date nights for dining experiences in our new community.

Last Friday night we went to a place called Larry's Pizza to see if their pizza could satisfy the pallet like a good ole Gina Special from Gina Maria's Pizza in Eden Prairie. We knew it was a pretty tall order, but we thought the place was up to it!

As we walked up to the front door we could see there were people standing around everywhere - lined up along the building, in the entry area and surrounding the hostess. I actually got excited thinking we had found the perfect pizza on our first attempt!

We slowly made our way to the hostess desk and starting asking questions. It appears we had arrived for the Friday night Pizza Buffet (also offered on Tuesdays) with all the salad and pizza you could eat for $10.00. We are trying to avoid buffets as we have found we tend to overeat and we knew we should have left. But, with so many people milling around waiting to be seated, we figured it must be really good pizza!

After 20 minutes of sipping on beverages, we were led to a numbered table. We dropped off our beverages and headed over to the salad bar to fill our plates. For the number of people seated in the restaurant, there was not much of a pizza selection under the warming lights. We headed back to our seats with salads. Within 2 minutes of sitting down, a waitress walked by us with a pizza in her hands and she was yelling out - "Garlic Ranch Chicken"! Following close behind was a co-worker offering "Peanut Butter Cookie with Chocolate". Shortly after that, a pizza ingredient I recognized - pepperoni - was offered. It was like a reverse buffet. The servers carried the pizzas around yelling out the ingredients and if you so much as twitched in their direction, they hand delivered their offerings to your plate. After snagging a few pieces of pizza in this way we were able to taste the wares.

It was what I call cardboard pizza – paper thin crust piled with a wild variety of ingredients, sauces and spices. They were offering pizzas I couldn't have imagined - even in my sleep! Ever try a margarita pizza? How about baked potato pizza. Not me! But people around us were gobbling them up like there was no tomorrow!

We decided we would try to snag a piece of the peach desert pizza. The desert was offered when we first came in but we didn't know how the game worked so we didn't snag any. We figured a fresh peach pizza desert would come out of the kitchen - eventually. After 10 minutes of waiting and watching, one of the servers spied us and came to our table. He noted we were not snagging pizza anymore and was wondering if we wanted refills on our beverage. We asked more questions and learned that if you want something special, you have to flag down a server and he/she will write down your table number on this huge white board by the kitchen. When the pizza of choice comes out - the server delivers the slices to the tables listed on the board, first.

I requested the peach pizza dessert. We had ample time to watch our fellow diners and servers as it took 20 minutes for the peach pizza dessert to be delivered - direct to our table. The server laid several small slices of the pizza on our plates and left yelling out "Peach Pizza Dessert." Jack and I figured peach must not be a local favorite. While it was delicious(much better than any of the meat and vegetable pizza's we tried) and well worth the wait; it will be a long time - if ever - before we venture back to Larry’s Pizza and his pizza buffet. As we battled our way through the massive wall of people still waiting to get seated, we decided the draw was on the quantity of pizza available - not the quality. Our search is still on for the perfect Arkansas pizza.