The 12th post in the Atlanta Pizza Days was the 3rd most popular pizza destination in my January pizza poll, Everybody’s Pizza.
10% of the voters named Everybody’s as one of their favorite pizza spots in the ATL, and if you head over to the Virginia-Highlands location on a weekend night you’ll see that the general population agrees. I myself had only eaten there once prior to this tasting, and has been the case with so many of these pizza destinations, I didn’t have much of a recollection of their style or recall what my sentiment was towards their pizza.
The other night I headed over to Everybody’s with Foodie Buddha to give it a go. If you read FB’s blog (which you should) you will know that he is a tough critic and I was looking forward to having his opinion as part of this series. It wasn’t hard to grab a table, in fact, I was surprised to see how empty it was, though it was a weeknight.
Everybody’s has two sections of pizzas – the regular and the “Pizza Crisps”, which are their very thin 13″ pizzas. While the latter option sounded intriguing we ended up going with two medium regular pizzas – one cheese and one “Everybody’s” (aka supreme). This was plenty of food, so I ended up having a lot of leftovers, thus we have 3 blind tasters for Everybody’s. Scores below.
Dough (average score -2.7/5)
- “thick, cake-like, undercooked for my tastes”
- Blind Taste – “end crust was great but crust underneath was too thick”
- Blind Taste – “thicker than I like, good though”
- Blind Taste – “nice and crispy/thick”
Sauce (average score – 1.9/5)
- “non-descript, there wasn’t much of it”
- Blind Taste – “bland but good amount”
- Blind Taste – “sauce is good but not very much”
- Blind Taste – “needed more flavor”
Cheese (average score – 2.5/5)
- “more cheese than I usually like, but this amount worked with a thicker slice like this, nice color”
- Blind Taste – “bland, a little too thick, evenly distributed”
- Blind Taste – “cheesy, good flavor overpowers sauce though”
- Blind Taste – “bland taste”
Overall (average score – 2.4/5)
- “too thick and doughy for my tastes, reheated slice was better, toppings were just meh”
- Blind Taste – “pretty bland flavor but good endcrust”
- Blind Taste – “no overall comments – 2.5″
- Blind Taste – “no overall comments – 3”
Final Thoughts: Before I give my thoughts, you will notice there are only one set of tasting notes that are non-blind, which is because I am forgetful and didn’t bring the score sheet with me so I didn’t get the official scores in each category from Foodie Buddha. He did email me later however, and true to form, he brought some serious candor.
I just can’t score either of the two pizza’s higher than a 0. The cheese pizza was non-descript and bland….the excessive amount of chees made it “barely passable”…the “everybody’s” was a bomb. The flavor was bland, the ingredients were third rate, and the price was ridunculous. On the plus side – the bartender was generous with his poor of hard liquor. A big fat zero from me. There you have it. Now do you think I’m being tough on these places? :-)My official comments are the first set of notes in each category above. While I don’t have an extremely positive opinion of the pizza I tried that night, I must say that an affinity to this pizza may be purely stylistic. One of the blind tasters was actually a big fan of this style of dough, but the dough was the largest complaint from two others. Also, I tasted one of the reheated slices and I think the dough got a little bit better after some more time in the oven. Besides the dough, the sauce was non-descript and the toppings were unmemorable. The plain cheese was the better of the two pizzas to me.
One interesting aspect of this experiment was that one of the blind tasters had previously said that Everybody’s was in his top 2 favorite pizza places in Atlanta. However, he didn’t recognize the pizza and he scored it the worst of the 3 blind tasters. He was quite surprised when I told him this pizza’s origin. I think there are two things that can be inferred from this situation. One, you can be influenced by prior experiences, destinations, your environment, and perceptions. And two, pizza quality can very from pie to pie.
I’m not extremely eager to go back, though I don’t want to paint too ugly of a picture because I think there are plenty of people that could get down on this pie. You just have to like a very thick crust and lots of cheese, and I think there are probably plenty of people that are happy to accommodate that request. For those of you like me that like a thinner, crispier style, maybe the Pizza Crisper is the way to go. Anyone have any comments on those?
Regardless of scores, Everybody’s is a pretty fun atmosphere, is in a great location, our server was very friendly, and I enjoyed the company so I ended up enjoying my visit.
Pictured above, you can see how I was able to rip the top half of the dough cleanly off from the bottom.
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