PARTI PIZZA - Ottawa ON

This video is another  #2020catchup from September.

I don't remember what prompted us to try Parti Pizza, but we gave it a whirl. I have yet to find a local pizza place in Ottawa that makes a pizza I really like, so it was worth a shot.  Who doesn't love a part(i) ?

 In the past I had read negative posts, but I've also read good ones, so this was going to be interesting. We saw it on the delivery app Skip the Dishes, and found a Family Pack combo we thought we would try: Large 3 topping pizza, 1lb of wings, fried zucchini sticks, and 3 cans of pop. It sounded pretty good and we put in our order. Then there were a few things that went not quite right.

First, we noticed that there was nothing about the zucchini on the confirmation bill after we ordered. I didn't want to call or even use the chat and decided to wait and see if it showed up. More on that later. Second, it took over an hour to get to us. This was on Skip, as after the order was confirmed, we were given a 30 minute delivery time. Then something went wrong, and the delivery driver that was assigned to us, suddenly disappeared, and we had to wait for a new one to be assigned and they had to wait a while to pick it up. 

When it finally arrived, the delivery person just put it on our chair outside; didn't ring the doorbell to tell us it was there, but the app let me know anyways. There was a giant pizza box, a bag with pop, and a paper bag with more food.

The pizza box was huge and felt like a ton of  bricks to lift up. That meant we weren't getting a tiny little pizza (it was a large, but still, this was big). The box was bright yellow and instead of having Parti Pizza on it, it was an ad for Videotron, a company that does internet and mobile phones. Kinda weird but I guess it's a way to cut some costs for the pizzeria. 

When opening the pizza box, I was impressed by the amount of toppings on the pizza; each slice was going to get a lot. But when I looked closer, I realized there was a dessert of cheese from the middle to the edge of the pie. There was a gap of where there was centimeters of no cheese to the crust, exposing a moat of pizza sauce, and in some parts, not even sauce. Was this pizza just made really quick and sloppy, or was this the standard way the pizza came?

It was a 3 topping pizza so we went for a meat feast: bacon, Italian Sausage, and pepperoni. The pepperoni is a style I'm not crazy about, which is a giant flat disk, about the size of a slice of bologna. It was also under the cheese so that means it was not crispy. But there was lots of chopped bacon on top and it was crispy. The sausage was a crumble and while not super flavourful. We also got a side of the Garlic Shawarma Sauce, which was a lot runnier than the toum I've had from other places, but it was still slightly sweet and garlicky. 

The overall make-up of this pizza was not like most Ottawa pizza places, for the most part. The crust was thin, with a nice bit of chew. The sauce was plentiful, thick and very tomatoey ... it was almost too much. The cheese, while plentiful, remained below most of the toppings (aside from the pepperoni). It was a decent pizza. Didn't love it, but certainly didn't hate it.

As for the deep fried zucchini, I wasn't sure if it was coming or not.  When I opened up the take-out paper bag, I saw the styrofoam clamshell with the wings. It was so full of wings, the lid couldn't close! I was stoked. But then I noticed the wings were sitting on tinfoil, and when I looked closer, it was really high up in the container. Turns out, under the tinfoil was the zucchini sticks. This kept everything warm I guess.

The sticks themselves were ok. I've never had good delivery zucchini sticks. They don't travel well. They were stubby and soggy and cold. I'm sure they would have been good fresh though. They also came with the garlic dip.

Above is the container with the wings sticking out and the zucchini hiding underneath.

The wings are sold by the pound at Parti Pizza, and the 1 pound order we got came with about 9 wings. There are no sides, but it did come with sour cream. To this day I can't believe someone would order sour cream with wings, but whatever.

I'm going to quickly sum up these wings: inconsistent. Everything was inconsistent. The wings were mostly small, but some verged on being a medium. Some wings were meaty, while others were not. The length varied about too.

The crispiness of the skin varied from wing to wing - actually, because some wings were sauced and others were not, the ones that were not were crispy, and the wet ones were soggy. Some of the wings were tender, while others tough and hard to pull apart. 

We went with Hot as the flavour - if it was just me eating them I would have gotten Suicide, but I wasn't the only one. There was lots of sauce, but they didn't toss the wings well, so they were not evenly coated.

The flavour of the Hot was a cayenne based hot sauce, but it didn't taste like plain Frank's Red Hot. Like there was some spice or even pepper added to it. Maybe it was just a different brand? It was good enough, but I just didn't love them.

FINAL SCORE:

While there were some hiccups that had more to do with the delivery service, we just were not crazy about Parti Pizza. The wings were inconsistent in size, quality, sauce, and while they weren't bad, they were not amazing either. The zucchini was ok, the garlic dip was ok, and the pizza was ok. It was a big pizza with lots of toppings, but the flavour didn't evoke a party in my mouth. Also, what's the deal with cheese and sauce not getting to the crust? I'm glad we tried them, but they will not be our go to in the future. 6/14

PARTI PIZZA

267 Greenbank Ave, Ottawa (Nepean) ON

partipizza.ca