1956 Bacon St, San Diego, CA 92107
Overall Pizza Awesomeness Rating: 2
Price for 1 salad and 1 small pizza: $23.79
Pizza Port is a sort of befuddling name until you realize that the chain has all of its venues located along the coast. And it certainly caters to the beach crowd with its casual atmosphere, long wooden picnic tables, and surf board décor.
As for parking, they actually have a parking lot! It can park nine usual vehicles and two handicapped vehicles. So… basically you will need to park on the street because there were easily one hundred people in the restaurant that day and that seemed to be a usual occurrence. And since it’s ocean beach… well, how good are you at parallel parking? We each found a spot several blocks away, in spots that certainly would have made parents uncomfortable if our vehicles had been teenagers slow dancing.
To say it’s noisy doesn’t really sum up the nature of this place. As you enter it’s not just your ears that run into a wall of noise but your eyes and body too. Besides a dining area and the counter at which you order, the space features an arcade where you can casually shoot wildlife or play pro-golf, a bar where you can sit watching one of the many TVs featuring current sporting events (they have some gf alcohol options), and customers popping up and down in a space poorly organized for the number of people it seats. (Seats being the operative word.)
The menu doesn’t mention vegan cheez, but they do have it. A gluten free crust is available as a small pizza only, which frankly makes us suspect that it comes from a freezer bag rather than being made in-house, and costs $3 extra. In perusing the menu for an additional food, because one small pizza of unknown awesomeness isn’t quite enough food but might be quite enough of that particular food, the only other vegan gf option is the house salad with balsalmic or italian dressing. (The other salads contained cheese and while it’s totally possible to ask for no cheese, it’s always a bummer to eat a dish that was created to include the character of certain flavors without all those flavors. Something always tastes like it’s missing.) We got both the pizza and the garden salad.
The counter service was fast and friendly. Finding your meal accoutrements and a place to sit were less so. The front of the restaurant is lined with the things you might want to include in your eating experience, like drinks and salt packets. Plastic forks were available but plastic knives seemed to have taken a vacation from the premises. The space between the counter and the tables is narrow enough that you will get touched non-consensually at least once. Not that anyone’s trying to be a jerk, but no one is trying to avoid being a jerk.
Scouting out a place to sit requires a mixture of higher brain function and primal instincts. Once a vacancy is spotted (and it takes some deduction because there are no defined seats, but rather benches that simply run the length of the restaurant), you must switch into primitive savvy mode –duck the oblivious person spinning around with a full cup of soda, nimbly leap over the throng of infants playing with goodness knows what in the aisle, and stealthily sidestep the mobility aid someone has sticking out from the seat since there are no ends to the table on which you could put a cane or crutch. Obstacle course thus negotiated, you revert back to high brain function to politely ask if that seat is taken.
The counter staff use a loudspeaker to announce when your food is ready. Yes, a loudspeaker is in fact necessary. Our salad was ready first. To say that it seemed like a classic pizza parlor salad is true in that the veggies seemed a bit past prime. They weren’t old per se, but California has such a long growing season certainly fresh and ripe tomatoes should be plentiful. What the salad actually had was romaine lettuce, cucumber, cherry tomatoes, a few rounds of green bell pepper, and raw white mushrooms. Kudos for using romaine instead of iceberg. It was a totally acceptable, if boring, salad.
Our pizza was ready a few minutes after our salad. The look was unappealing, but we asked the patron next to us to take our picture with it anyway. After that first bite, well...Kate applied a liberal coating of salt and red pepper, Terese a bit of red pepper.
The crust, which was decent, was the best part of this pizza. It had a pretty good taste and held together beautifully. The texture was its main problem. It was quite thin and nearly burned on the edges and had the mouth feel of pop tart crust. (Does anyone like pop tart crust?) The cheez was slightly bubbly looking, but because it had no real melt or stretch it looked like those tiny rice sticks you get atop your food at some Asian restaurants that taste like nothing -just like this cheez. It didn’t stick to the roof of our mouths. And it definitely had no grease as a flavor carrier, though what flavor it would have carried is unclear.
While it might be okay that the cheez had no flavor, the sauce had a definite and sour flavor. Sauce is one of those few things that we don’t need modified between the two of us, so it’s a real shame when that’s messed up. Terese searched in vain for table-side oregano to help deaden the tartness of the sauce, but was not willing to take the full picnic-bench obstacle course tour to ask a cashier. Kate found herself enjoying the pizza more when she ate past the sauce to the tough crust edges. So sad.
We got mushrooms on our pizza and despite the pizza’s overall flaws, the mushrooms were good. They were cooked such that they maintained some juiciness but weren’t rubbery and alleviated the stern sauce somewhat.
Pros: Decent crust flavor, right near the ocean.
Cons: Disappointing cheez, crowded and noisy, mediocre salad, not like classic pizza but trying to be.
Ratings are based on a scale from 1-5; 1 being "uh-uh!" and 5 being "great!"
| Locale | Overall score: 3 |
|---|---|
| Atmosphere | 2 |
| Parking | 1 |
| Location | 4 |
| Noise | 1 |
| Bathroom cleanliness | 1 |
| Crust | Overall Score: 4 |
| Cohesiveness | 5 |
| Taste | 4 |
| Texture | 3 |
| Durability | 5 |
| Cheez | Overall score: 2 |
| Taste | 1 |
| Melt | 2 |
| Mouth feel | 3 |
| Overall pizza | |
| Taste | 2 |
| Visual | 1 |
| Value | 1 |
| Authenticity | 2 |
