First Slice of Pizza

Our family has a tradition of trying out a slice of pizza from a local place when we travel. We rate the pizza and the place, with the goal of collecting everything into a pizza/travel blog. That’s still mostly in the works, but I knew I’d need to have some pizza while I was here to carry on the tradition.

The problem is, with such a limited amount to time to try all the foods down here that aren’t available in Oregon, I just haven’t been feeling like going out for pizza. But I was sort of intrigued, because the cheese down here is so different from the cheese we have at home, so I was wondering how that would affect the pizza.

Finally, my opportunity came. I was in downtown fairly late (for me), and was likely to get home after dinner. My bus drove past an open pizza place, about a block from my stop. Nice!

Looks like the perfect place to try out my first slice of Costa Rican pizza!

It was pretty similar to any other city pizza place I’ve been to- slices up front, you order what you want and they reheat it in the oven. And it was cheap! A huge slice was a bit less than $2.50, and it was about 20 cents more if you wanted the drink of the day with it (in this case, iced tea),

The slice itself was good but not great. The crust was excellent- thin and crispy, but bready enough to fold. The sauce was pretty good, but a little sweeter than I prefer. In general, it seems like Costa Ricans like their foods to be very sweet, so that makes sense. It had a good onion flavor.

The cheese was a disappointment, though. There just wasn’t much of it. The white specks you see on the slice were cheese, plus I think there was a little bit of another clear, melty kind on it, but very light. In general, the cheese here doesn’t have a strong flavor, so especially since it was really light, it just got lost in the slice itself. I even tried to pick off some cheese to eat it separately, but it still didn’t have much flavor to it.

The good news, I guess, is that this means the slice was not very greasy at all and probably pretty healthy. But I still would have liked to have had more cheese on it! I will have to try another place now just to see if it was a trend, or just the way that they made it at this particular place.

Nice big holes in the red pepper shaker’s lid.

Condiments were your standard red peppers and parmesan cheese.

The “pizza” part of the menu.

It’s tough to see from this shot, but in addition to the pre-made combos you can order, they also had hamburgers, hot dogs, and (of course) gallo pinto for breakfast.

As far as the pizza goes, one thing I noticed was that they didn’t have a plain cheese slice available, or a plain pizza on the menu with any sort of “build your own” toppings. It was buy one of their combos, or nothing. The margarita would be the closest to plain cheese pizza if you ordered a whole pie, but they didn’t have a slice of it. I got a slice of their veggie, of course. It will be interesting to see if other places do it the same way.