Grimaldi's Pizza - Whoa!

I don't know if it is a good or a bad trait, but humanity wants to find the best of every thing.  We have awards, we have contests, all to figure out which thing is best.  One of my personal quests has been to find the best pizza.  It's a silly quest, because it is subjective.  The best I can do is find the pizza I like best.  Yet, even that is dumb, because on any given day I might not feel like having the "best" pizza anyway.  Oh well, one of the joys of living in a first-world country is time and energy to do stupid stuff.  The trick is not doing stuff that directly hastens the end of civilization.

So, pizza.  This is a particularly time consuming quest, because everyone makes pizza.  There are millions of pizza restaurants.  I wonder if there are more pizza restaurants in the world than McDonalds.  So, if you want to figure out which is the best, there is a lot of pizza to sift through.  If you have read my blog in the last year, you have learned I have fallen in love with Rosati's.  Surprisingly, Rosati's is a chain.  I am somewhat prejudiced against chains, yet, here I am, telling you of another fabulous pizza chain - Grimaldi's.

My dad told me that Grimaldi's was better, perhaps, than Rosati's.  This was a shocker, since my dad's recommendation helped me finally get out to Rosati's in the first place.  There are a couple Grimaldi's in my town, one very near my office.  So, Kevin and I saddled up and tried it.  Here's what Grimaldi's does:

1. Limited menu.  They have pizza and salad.  No calamari appetizers, no pasta.  They only do pizza and salad.  That's it.  If you want something else, you are in the wrong place.

2. Their ingredients are stellar.  These are ingredients like you would buy at a farmer's market (from the looks of them), not bags of ingredients from a warehouse.  (I know, their ingredients almost certainly came from a warehouse, but they don't LOOK or TASTE like they did)  The pepperoni is not all the same size.  Think about that.  What is a pepperoni that you put on a pizza?  It is a slice of a sausage.  Are sausages infinitely long?  No.  Do they taper at the ends?  Yes.  So why do so many pizzas have pepperonis that don't show the taper?  I don't know.  It sounds fishy to me.  But, at Grimaldi's you can tell these are pepperoni slices from a reasonably sized and shaped pepperoni.  The mozzarella is slices, not shreds of fresh tasting mozzarella.  I could go on, but won't.

3.  Service.  Super attentive.  At one point during my second visit, I thought for a brief moment they were too attentive, but then they changed my mind by going out of their way to individually wrap my dad's left over slices.

Verdict:  Holy Crap Amazing.  ( I should standardize my ratings - H.C.A. is probably a 9).  Now for the stupid question:  Is it the best?  It is the best thin crust, standard topping pizza.  That is, I haven't had a better thin crust tomato sauce pepperoni pizza.  However, I may have had a better thin crust pizza at Pizzeria Bianco.  I have had the best italian beef and sausage sandwich at Rosati's.  I have had the best thick crust pizza at Rosati's.  My point is, it isn't lonely at the top and Grimaldi's is up there.

Go there.  Eat there.  Thank me by buying me a slice.