Pizza Review: Pizza Cooked via Coal Taste Like Coal

My dad, Tommy T, was out of town and was in danger of missing his precious Thursday Post-Gazette. What’s important about the Thursday paper is that it holds all the mysteries of the weekend activities. This weekend’s edition outlined the Arts Festival and probably made a bunch of jokes of how it’s probably going to rain. Sorry if you’re not from Pittsburgh, it’s a really dumb joke.

In return for retrieving the Thursday paper on his behalf, Tommy T was going to bring me some coal fired pizza from Anthony’s Coal Fired pizza out in Robinson. There are actually Anthony’s all over the country capitalizing on this coal fired trend. I’m not sure why anyone would buy a coal fired pizza. Would you let Bert the chimney sweep make you a pizza right after his chimney cleaning shift? No. You wouldn’t. You don’t want soot and ash all over your dinner. Yet this coal fired phenomemon delivers such an experience at a premium price.

By the time my dad delivered the pizzas from Robinson they were fairly cold. He had to kill some time before I was home from work, so while he ran some errands in Bloomfield he hid the pizzas in his trunk because he was, “Worried someone might break into my car and steal all the pizzas.” Unfortunately, I wouldn’t put it past some Bloomfield citizens.

The pizzas were charred on their edges. They looked like they escaped battled, blackened by a brush with death. Their shells compromised, they were half the pizzas they should’ve been. Biting into a coal fired slice certainly wasn’t as exotic or appealing as you would hope it would be. It’s as gross sounding as eating frog legs, but, unlike frog legs, this tastes just as bad as it sounds. Sensing the cheese or toppings (pepper and arugula in this case) was an impossible task. My poor tastebuds had to battle through a bastion of blackness to taste anything resembling a pizza. 

The circumstances were unfortunate. Coal fired pizza may not be for me. I’m a fan of the simple and fundamental pizzas. Pizzas that have their crust tickled by a playful flame or were birthed in a brick oven. Burning a pizza has classicly been a sign of amateurism and I’m not sure basing an entire company around this idea is such a great idea, Anthony.

Tommy T may think otherwise.