Sorrento's Pizza

Review #9: Sorrento’s – Margherita Pizza – $19

This is a serious sports bar!

I hear that Taste of Cincinnati is the official kickoff of summer in Cincinnati.  I’m debating on grabbing the foods that one best of awards and doing a blog post for this event.  Hopefully some people will enjoy seeing some of the things they missed.  The only problem is I’m still 8 weeks behind on my posts.  Fail! 

Mmm...greasy, greasy garlic bread.

For this week I have my first pizza place of the year, Sorrento’s.  It took 9 weeks for me to finally get into going to a pizza place.  I had to clean out my system from doing all those damn burgers last year.  You can find Sorrento’s in Norwood off of Montgomery rd a bit north of the Norwood Lateral.  They are a well established place dating back to 1956.  They also serve a few of the classic Italian dishes that you’d expect.  Their website says that they have been mentioned in tons of new articles and have won several awards for best pizza.  I had been extremely busy and trying to meet up with a vegetarian friend of mine and managed to make it out on Thursday, March 1^st.  The first thing you notice inside the building is that it was empty.  I don’t know if there was something awesome happening elsewhere that night but it was eerily quiet, with only one patron at the massive bar.  You’ll also notice that they are insane about their local sports including Red’s baseball and softball.  This place is a sports bar with a lot of tv’s and trophy’s, but if that’s your thing I will add that it really has that community feel that you are lacking from chain restaurants.  It is definitely one of a kind and they seem like the kind of people that would get to know your name if you went a couple times.  If you are curious as to what the other pizza places are see the list here.

12" Margherita Napoletana pizza.

From the menu you can see that pizza is their specialty.  Since I was training for the flying pig half marathon in March I was craving carbs, so I asked the lone waitress what her favorite things on the menu were.  She was a fan of the garlic bread with a side of spaghetti sauce (5$).  This was a house made hoagie bun with cuts on the top loaded with butter and garlic awesomeness.  I also really like their homemade sauce that’s just the right amount of sweetness to it.  The specialty pizzas and sandwiches are made after Cincinnati sports figures and natives (Since I grew up in Wisconsin, I admit that I had cheat here and had to google this one).  The make their own sauce, bread, Italian sausage, mortadella, and “secret dressing”.  The pizzas include the Pizza Bianca (Ala Greg Cook) which is your typical white pizza, the Enrico (Named after their dad) which is a sausage, pepperoni, veggie, and the Home Run (Ala Pat Tabler) which is pep, sausage, bacon lots of veggies, extra cheese and extra sauce.  The home run sounds great to me, but since my friend is a vegetarian most of the time, the waitress suggested the Margherita Napoletana (Queen of Italy) pizza.  A medium 12” margherita pizza (19$) has slices of tomato, garlic, oregano, olive oil, 3 cheese and “secret ingredients”.  I’m always a fan of a margherita pizza and this one didn’t disappoint on taste, with great tomatoes and something in the cheese or secret ingredients that made it really good.  One of the main things that makes the difference in a pizza crust is having it charred on the bottom, which chain places with assembly lines do NOT have.  The oregano, on the other hand, was dry oregano and didn’t blend in with the pizza’s flavor.  Fresh oregano would have had  a more pronounced flavor.  Another thing is, after working in the pizza industry for 4 years, I have been known to take down an entire 12” pizza in one sitting, and then some.  This price for a small pizza with dry oregano on it kinda irritates me.  I went to many other places (A Tavola, Newport pizza, Pomodoris)  with fresh, exotic ingredients that weren’t chains and shopped local, and at every one of them I still paid less than Sorrento’s, so they get low marks for price.   

While this is a pizza experience to put in the books as very tasty and community oriented, I don’t think I’ll be making the trek back anytime soon, especially since there is a top 50 pizza places list I have to try eventually.  I am so looking forward to going out for some awesome pizzas this year!