June 24, 2009

Garibaldi Mexican Grill & Pizza

Located on West Main, Garibaldi Mexican Grill (and Pizza) didn't strike us as a pizza restaurant in the beginning. Originally, we were hesitant to add Garibaldi to our exhaustive list of restaurants, especially considering their pizza is quite obviously an afterthought to a far more developed selection of Mexican cuisine. However, in the name of completeness (we did go to Liz Sue Bagels, after all), Garibaldi finds its way onto the Pizza Tour in hopes of surprising us all.

Establishment. Unsurprisingly, Garibaldi seems like a better fit for the Burrito Tour than for the Pizza Tour. With bright, vibrant colors, Aztec (Mayan?) tapestries, ornate sombreros hanging from the ceiling, and a large wall-mounted flat screen seemingly dedicated to Cablevision's iO en espaƱol package, the last thing you'd think to order here is pizza. Regardless, the restaurant was spacious and clean with comfortable seating and service that was slower than death, but reasonably personable given a generally shaky grasp on the English language. Garibaldi's menu consists of traditional Mexican specialties including but not limited to tacos, fajitas, burritos, enchiladas, tostadas, nachos, flautas, and tortas, as well as specialty combos, pizza y mucho mas.

Pizza. Garibaldi's pizza is exactly what one would expect from a Mexican restaurant, that is: horrible. Absolutely horrible. Founded on a thick, spongy, breadlike crust, completely devoid of crispness and flavor, this pizza is nothing to brag about. The sauce was mediocre and thick, tasting overly bland and cooked down, not unlike any canned pasta sauce one might find at the grocery store. The "highlight" of this pie for us was the laughably massive slab of (comparatively tasty) cheese that gingerly rested on this horribly bland sauce. The cheese was in such excess that when most of it predictably came sliding off the pizza and collected into a tennis ball sized mound resembling Pizza the Hut, there was still more than enough cheese left on each slice.
This mass of cheese coupled with the shear thickness of this pie's crust made eating a single slice extremely laborious, making polishing this pizza off seem futile after only two or three bites. Our topping of choice, chorizo sausage, was not chorizo at all, but rather a dull, tasteless sausage masquerading around as the spicy pork delicacy that we were hoping for, capping off a disappointing but mostly predictable leg of the Pizza Tour.

The bottom line. Mexican restaurants and pizza don't usually go hand in hand and Garibaldi's awful cheesy mess is a perfect example as to why that's the case.

Establishment: 19/30
Pizza: 13/30
Hits the Spot: 3.3/10
Large Cheese: $10.95

Garibaldi Mexican Grill on Urbanspoon

awardSeal

AWARDS WON:

2009 – Most Cheese

2 comments:

  1. Would it have helped if the pizza were served by mask-wearing luchadors? That would be awesome.

    ReplyDelete

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