http://www.campbellpizza.com/Today Alicia and I had a craving for a pizza. Normally I make my own from scratch but our oven is awaiting a repair service so we decided to try a new place out. I put my faith in the reviewers of yelp.com and we choose La Pizzeria in Campbell which had an impressive 4 star average over 191 reviews.
We walked in at 6pm on a Tuesday and we were the only ones inside. There were 2 or 4 people eating outside. This is always okay with me because I assume the the service will be better and the food will come out quicker. Alicia asked what the soup of the day was. The server said "a mixed vegetable pureed in a chicken broth". Alicia decided to pass on that and get a Caesar salad. I however was the mood to try stuff and ordered the soup.
The soup was very thin and tasted mostly like a tomato soup. Honestly it tasted like a can of Campbell's soup that had been opened and personally warmed up for me! This has to be the worst "soup of the day" I've had anywhere. Alicia's salad didn't come with croutons but large chunks of cooked pizza dough cut into triangles. She didn't know what to do with them (they were 3-4 times the size of a tortilla chip). Alicia also complained that the lettuce was just a bunch of large pieces and not broken up enough for eating on a fork. Okay, so disappointing appetizers but this is a pizza joint you say, how were the pizzas?
Alicia got the "Tirolese" which included smoked prosciutto, onions, and blue cheese. She said the combination of flavors were nice but they was very little prosciutto, onions, and blue cheese on it. There was plenty of greasy mozzarella though, forming a pool of grease in the middle of the pizza, like Crater lake. I had the "Sarda" which included black olives and fresh sausage. Like Alicia's pizza I had the lake of grease in the center of my pizza. The problem they have is the pizza is larger than the plate so your crust is at a higher elevation than the center and all the hot oily grease funnels to the middle. This saturates the thin crust at the center and made both pizzas soggy in the center. Why not bring the pizza out on a flat board? Especially since they make YOU cut the pizza. I thought they had forgot to cut our pizzas but looking on Yelp I see other people have complained about this. They also only give you a butter knife to cut the pizza with. It wasn't really hard to cut to seriously, cut the pizza from now on. The "fresh sausage" actually did taste fresh and was one of the better sausage toppings I've had on a pizza. The olives were terrible. They put whole black pitted olives on the pizza. You would pick a slice up and the soggy tip would flop over like a soccer player in the World Cup and the black olives would go rolling down onto the plate. Hey that's okay because I love olives just as they are, you can eat them all by themselves. Well, good olives you can. These seemed to have been soaked in a brine of tap water and nothing else. They had a terrible texture and no flavor. They only thing Alicia and I agreed on was the crust tasted good. As mentioned though, it was soggy in the middle due to Greasy Lake and it takes more that good crust to make a good pizza. Needless to say we didn't even ask about deserts and wanted to get out of their ASAP. To top it all off, the bill with tax and tip was 50$ for two sub par pizzas and a soup and salad. We ordered no drinks. Considering I can get a decent large mushroom pizza from a take out joint for 20$ why would I ever go back to La Pizzeria? For the Campbell's soup of course!
Take a pass on this place or at least know that you were warned.