Located on West Main, Athens Pizza & Family Restaurant is a family owned institution calling Stamford its home since 1977. Athens contends that "[their] restaurant is clean, hospitable, and best of all, entertaining," and while we don't have a metric for "entertaining" (nor were we sure that it mattered), we're in the position to test most of that claim and then some.

Establishment. Athens Pizza looks to be a wonderful restaurant from afar, and to an extent, it is. Their dining room is large and open, with beautiful tiled floors an abundance of windows flooding the restaurant with natural light. Unfortunately, this dining room is packed to the rafters with cramped, torture rack seating that can barely accommodate a party of four. The restaurant is considerably clean save for some stray food scraps tucked away under the tiny, impractical tables and a peculiar slippery film that coated every tile in the building. While we couldn't sit comfortably or juke a defensive back, we certainly could order off an amazingly diverse menu stacked with salads, soups a soup, hot and cold sandwiches, and a wide array of Greek specialties including gyros, souvlaki, falafel, and of course, traditional Greek pan pizza.

Pizza. There aren't too many good things to say about this pizza and we could chalk it all up to our topping of choice, loukaniko. This authentic Greek pork sausage, flavored with fennel, anise, and orange peel offended both our palates and our sensibilities, coming back to haunt us in the form of wretched burps and scarring memories for the remainder of the day, if not longer. The sausage rendered this pie just short of inedible, exuding oil such that the pizza looked like a waxy mess from the moment it hit the table. The crust was nothing like the buttery, Greek style crusts we've come to know and love, it was chewy, airy, and largely flavorless. The cheese was absurdly greasy (again, due to Mr. Loukaniko) but passable in the flavor department, however, it congealed almost immediately, forming a shell like coat that slid around across the thick, now loukaniko-ized sauce like Brian Boitano in the 1988 Olympics. It pains us to have a single ingredient weigh so heavily on our opinions as this devil sausage did, but thems the breaks for now.

The bottom line. Athens Pizza looks great from the outside and tempting from the dining room, but our visit was inconclusive, as it was unfairly tainted by a extremely poor choice of toppings on our part.

Establishment: 20/30
Pizza: 13/30
Hits the Spot: 2.7/10
Large Cheese: $12.75

UPDATE: We've decided to give Athens another bite at the apple, so to speak, as our penchant for choosing unique toppings if a restaurant offers them just plain blew up in our face on this particular visit. This review will stand as our honest opinion of this particularly topped pie, but shouldn't speak for the quality of Athens' pizza in general. We'll be back.

UPDATE 2: We went back.