So I have a dilemma that I thought I’d put forth to you, the readers. If you had some of the best pizza you’ve ever eaten, but it showed up to your door looking like this, would you order from this pizza place again?
This is what our pizza looked like when it arrived - no joke
Thus is my experience with Fat Sal’s Pizza. In the interest of full disclosure, I may have caused our pizza to arrive looking like that, although I still don’t know if that makes it acceptable.
We were continuing our quest for our go-to pizza place and decided to try out Fat Sal’s on 10th Ave. I placed our order on delivery.com, a website that we’ve used before, and somehow our address was messed up. I don’t really know how that happened, but I must’ve mistyped it at some point. We do have an account and I just logged into it, so I didn’t check the address before I submitted our order. We’ve ordered using that account previously without any problems so I wasn’t aware there was an issue.
Nevertheless, when the pizzeria called us up to verify our address, Josh apologized profusely about the mistake. So the deliveryman had traveled four blocks out of his way, and we honestly felt badly about it. We planned to make it up to him in the tip, and we would have completely understood if it took a long time for the delivery to come or if our food was cold. We were definitely in the wrong, and we knew that.
We didn’t open up the pizza box until after the deliveryman took his tip and left, and now we understand his haste in getting out of our apartment. Lets see that picture again, close up this time, and from a different angle.
Different angle, but still just as messed up
So what happened? Did he purposely turn our pizza box sideways in retaliation for sending him to the wrong address? But he must have realized it was an honest mistake, not a vicious sabotage to send him four blocks in the wrong direction. And why didn’t he think that we would be apologetic and try to make it up to him with a larger tip? It doesn’t make sense. I can understand that if we shafted him on the tip, then the next time we ordered he would do that to our pizza. So maybe he dropped the pizza by accident? The pizza was in such a state that there’s no way he didn’t realize he had dropped it or tilted it severely. It was completely mangled and glued together at the side of the box.
I managed to pry most of the pieces apart, but not without losing a lot of cheese in the process. Surprisingly, the pizza was still warm. The crust was pretty floppy though, and I don’t know if that was a result of the treatment or if that’s how the crust normally is. It wasn’t super thin nor was it too thick. The outer crust was actually really good, with a bit of crispiness on the outside and a nice chewy texture on the inside. It reminded me of a really good baguette. Despite the floppiness, I really did enjoy the pizza and thought it was the best that I’ve had yet on our quest.
Mangled slice with unintentional underside shot
The chicken parmesan hero was also really good. It was huge and served on a nice crispy roll. There was a lot of chicken but could have used a bit more cheese. Still, it was pretty tasty.
Chicken parm hero
The garlic knots were standard but they had a nice texture to them and good garlic coverage.
Decent garlic knots
So what’s the verdict? I don’t know. I really enjoyed the pizza and would have definitely ordered from here again had the pizza not arrived in such a disastrous state. But I do feel bad about the address mix-up, so maybe I was partially to blame. Still, do I want to order from a place that would either be so vindictive or so careless? It’s a tough call. I’m going to work my way through the other pizzerias in the area, and if I don’t find anything better, maybe I’ll consider ordering from here again. If you were in my shoes, what would you do?
Fat Sal’s Pizza (multiple locations)
730 10th Ave. at 50th St.
New York, NY
Tags: Delivery, Midtown West, Pizza
I usually would not visit a restaurant again if the service was bad even though the food was great but not the absolute best I’ve had. But in this case, since it’s pizza-delivery and not dine-in (plus the fact that you mentioned it to be the best you’ve had in your quest) I’d say yes!