Another newcomer to the Stamford pizza scene is Rizzuto’s, a local chain with locations in Westport, Bethel, and West Hartford, in addition to their new digs in the old Route 22 in Stamford.

Establishment. Rizzuto’s is a peculiarly Olive Garden-y restaurant. From its dubious location in a strip mall to its highly polished décor and menu items with no fewer than 8 vowels per word, this is every bit the spitting image of nobody’s favorite Italian restaurant. Aside from all of the uniform gloss, this restaurant does have some character, be it manufactured or not. With its open kitchen, comfortable and plentiful seating, and attentive service, Rizzuto’s has a friendly air about it. The menu is what you’d expect of an Italian restaurant—antipastos, pastas (avoid eating simultaneously), salads, and entrees that end in parmigiana—as well as a good selection of traditional and signature pizzas.

Pizza. Our pizzas of choice were a plain and a meatball pie off of Rizzuto’s Neapolitan menu (they also offer margherita-style pizzas that omit tomato sauce in favor of plum tomatoes).

The crusts were wood-fired and blistered to oblivion, with a nice char, chewiness, as well as an unfortunate and peculiar popcorn taste that we haven’t come across before (and hopefully won’t have to again). The sauce was bright and fresh but bland for the most part with only some subtle tanginess begging to be noticed. The high spot on this pie was without a doubt the cheese—a house made fresh mozzarella—lending a delicious creaminess and welcome stringiness to an otherwise middle-of-the-road pie.

Our meatball pizza had the same weird popcorn crust dealbreaker as the plain cheese pie, but the saltiness of the meatball brought out some of the subtleties of the sauce for a better overall taste. Despite looking rather stout and robust though, the crust couldn’t hold up to the the toppings and made for a more cumbersome pizza.

Bottom line. Despite a nice, welcoming atmosphere, Rizzuto’s puts forth a mediocre pizza that’s far from bad and just as far from good.

Establishment: 25/30
Pizza: 16/30
Hits the Spot: 4.5/10 
Large cheese: $10.95 (13")

For those living under a rock (or those too preoccupied with actual news), there’s a new pizza in town and it’s rattling some cages. At the helm of Rico’s kitchen are two former employees of Stamford’s iconic dive, Colony Grill, and they’ve (allegedly) brought the pizza with them. Normally, we like to give new places time to settle in so that the inconsistencies, growing pains, and stupid waits normally associated with new places have a chance to die down. This time, Stamford’s newest rivalry didn’t afford us that luxury.

Establishment. Plainly put, Rico’s is a takeout/delivery joint with a few tables in it. At best, they’re a counter service pizzeria with a 45 minute wait (partially due to the buzz surrounding the “illegal” use of Colony’s recipes, partially due to the curiosity that comes with having a new pizza in town to try). We tried to call ahead four or five times to place our order before we got there but the phones kicked us straight to voicemail despite them being manned by at least two people at any given time. Nonetheless, were were taken care of by a friendly staff without having to look at creepy painted wood cutouts while delivery orders went flying out the door in the interim. While we’re talking about differences between this place and another place, it certainly bears mentioning that Rico’s menu includes calzones, empanadas, wedges, wraps, and salad offerings in addition to the contentious little pizzas that brought us there.

Pizza. The minute these pizzas hit the table, we were thinking the same thing that you are looking at these pictures, “Boy, that pie looks familiar…” Upon further investigation, it also tastes familiar. Rico’s crust is super thin with crispy edges, a hearty crunch, and a surprisingly chewy bite that you wouldn’t expect from a cracker-thin pie (unless, of course, you’ve had some exposure to pizzas like this…) that contributes chiefly to the overall flavor. Rico’s sauce and cheese meld together in an intricate lace that yields a big texture and a not-so-special flavor. While adding a stringy, satisfying snap, the cheese seems like an afterthought with its flavor. Moreover, the sauce is noticeably underseasoned and carries an unnatural sweetness beyond what we’d naturally expect from tomatoes. Couple that with the breakneck speed at which the pizza cools and you have a recipe for a pie that doesn’t hold up very well after it’s been out of the oven for 10-15 minutes.

At it’s heart, Rico’s Pizza is about the toppings. With small, cookie-sized pizzas (okay, admittedly a big cookie), it naturally follows that they become customized to the individual with ingredients that fill the gaps left open by the lackluster sauce and cheese elements. We ordered a hot oil and stingers (hot peppers) pie and one with sausage. The hot oil was bold, spicy, and most importantly, used in moderation to complement the peppers for a considerably less greasy texture than an oil topping would lead you to think (in fact, all of the pizzas were considerably less greasy). Additionally, the sausage added much needed heartiness and saltiness to the pie that it was generously strewn across. Rico’s enters the Stamford pizza scene as a solid competitor to other thin crust bar pies, with subtle improvements that set it apart, albeit slightly.

Bottom line. Rico’s is the quintessential bar pie without the bar. If you’re looking for a good, traditional pizza, there are other places to go, but if you’ve got a Colony addiction, Rico’s is a viable substitute.

Establishment: 16/30
Pizza: 21/30
Hits the Spot: 7/10 
Large cheese: $8.50 (13")

NOTE: You might remember that our previous visit to Athens did not end particularly well on account of a poor choice of toppings on our part. As such, we revisited the restaurant for a pizza with a far less putrid topping. The following review is a repost of our previous review, edited of course, to reflect our opinion of Athens Pizza sans loukaniko.

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, and staffed with personable, attentive servers. 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. In an attempt to expose the truth and to exorcise the loukaniko-flavored demons of reviews past, Athens put together a pretty respectable pizza for us this time around. While the crust still didn't have the same buttery, flaky, Greek-style texture we've grown accustomed to, it was still substantially chewy and crispy (surprisingly with some typically Italian-style char) despite coming up short in the flavor department. The cheese was up to par as well, with a delightfully stringy snap and a clean, fresh flavor hampered only by its inability to stay hot and not congeal. The sauce was a bit thick, tasting cooked down and overseasoned in addition to being a little over-proportioned, causing the cheese to slip around and for the pie to feel less than coherent. The difference this time is that the flavors present were good ones, so the overpowering nature of these ingredients was far less detrimental. Our topping of choice, sausage courtesy of De Yulio's Italian Sausage, was excellent as always, complementing the pizza as a whole as good toppings are wont to do.

The bottom line. Athens Pizza looks great from the outside and tempting from the dining room with a diverse, Greek menu and a pizza that's about average but certainly worth trying as long as loukaniko has no place on top of it.

Establishment: 20/30
Pizza: 19/30
Hits the Spot: 6.3/10
Large Cheese: $12.75

Just when it seemed like we were finished, we got a request for this little gem that slipped past us despite having been around Stamford for 17 years. Impossible to visit during normal Pizza Tour hours, we had to make a special Monday afternoon excursion down to Canal St. for this one.

Establishment. Catering to the office lunch crowd, Vinny's Dock House (not to be confused with Vinny's Backyard) is primarily a deli and is open accordingly ("Daily, In Season from 7:30 am," for what it's worth). Located dockside (no surprise there), Vinny's has a very unique ambiance, clean indoor and outdoor tables, and a view of the water that you can't get elsewhere (save for Paradise Bar & Grill). The service was what one would expect of a deli: quick, businesslike counter service that was less than personable, but personable enough. Vinny's menu includes breakfast options, salads, hot and cold deli sandwiches served on Arthur Avenue breads, hot special entrees (meatloaf, chicken, pork chops, fresh fish on Fridays), pastas, and thin crust personal pizza à la "The Colony."

Pizza. Modeled after "The Colony's" iconic bar pie, the pizza at Vinny's Dock House evolved from a traditional Italian-style pizza "in the pan" to its current, derivative product upon customer requests over Vinny's time in Stamford. The whole wheat crust (which was admittedly a secondary option as they'd run out of their primary white crust) was extremely thin, making up for a prominent lack of flavor with an overabundance of crunch and char. The cheese tasted average at best with its weak flavors and rather salty notes in addition to being very dry and congealing fast (not unlike Colony, after all). The sauce was a relative highlight of this pizza, tasting of fresh tomatoes with a light, clean, simple bitterness and little else. That said, this underseasoning did not impress everyone. Our topping of choice, homemade meatballs, made this pie much more palatable due to both their abundance and immense flavor. Nonetheless, this aspect was unable to pull Vinny's pizza from its role as nothing more than a mediocre bar pie imitation of one of the most overrated pizzas in Stamford.

The bottom line. While we're sure Vinny's Dock House is a fine deli, their pizza is a lackluster imitation of admittedly better pies in town, with flashes of meatball brilliance that left us wondering what this pizza would be like if it would just be itself (that's the moral of the story, kids).

Establishment: 17/30
Pizza: 16/30
Hits the Spot: 5.3/10
Large Cheese: $7.50 (12")

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 español 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

AWARDS WON:

2009 – Most Cheese

Located dockside at Stamford Landing Marina, Paradise Bar & Grille is traditionally a summer destination because of its ambiance, happy hour, and relative seclusion on the waterfront. While specializing primarily in overpriced seafood and bar fare, they also have pizza.

Establishment. Paradise Bar & Grille is a beautiful, spacious, reasonably clean establishment that truly lives up to it's name with a unique, open air dining room overlooking the Sound marina and the fleet of private boats docked within. The breeze off the water is conveniently squelched by strategically placed propane heaters, making for a very comfortable outdoor dining experience regardless of the weather. Paradise makes up for lost patio space in the wintertime with a large, indoor fireplace, although waterside dining is far less charming when it's 17 degrees outside. In any event, the service was quick and relatively personable, but inattentive and more characteristic of the restaurant's full bar than of a table service restaurant. Paradise's (exceedingly pricey) menu consists primarily of seafood with some salad and sandwich options as well as a comparatively limited selection of specialty and traditional pizzas.

Pizza. The pizza at Paradise Bar & Grille didn't really wow us, but it still wasn't half bad. The crust was rather tasty, with a hearty, yeasty bite, but really disappointed in the texture department as it was lifelessly devoid of crispness and felt undercooked. However, the cheese seemed to be cooked to perfection with a wonderful golden brown color and above average flavor. We were less than enthusiastic about this pie's sauce as it was about average quality with an interestingly tangy, well-seasoned flavor, but appeared in such excess on the pizza that it was overwhelming. This mass of sauce made for a pie that fell apart quite easily, the cheese sliding clear off the crust at every opportunity. Our topping of choice, sausage, was also interesting and rather divisive amongst our judges, with some of us deeming it weird and borderline inedible due to the overpowering taste of fennel seeds, and some of us appreciating its uniqueness. Overall, this pizza was about on par with the bar pies we've had with some extra touches that could go either way as a matter of preference.

The bottom line. Paradise Bar & Grill is a great place to eat out if you've got some money to burn, especially during the summer, but its pizza is just about average at best, albeit interesting and somewhat unique.

Establishment: 25/30
Pizza: 18/30
Hits the Spot: 6.0/10
Large Cheese: $9.95 (12")

Located on West Ave., Outpost Pizza is one of the lesser known pizzerias in town. Touting a "father and son place, putting Stamford on the map for great tasting pizza," Outpost is admirably audacious with a menu full of claims that the Stamford Pizza Tour was made to test.

Establishment. There's not a whole lot to say about Outpost's establishment, as they're primarily takeout only with but one table and a few chairs in a relative hole in the wall next to a liquor store on the South End. That said, Outpost pizza was far more inviting than we expected considering its lackluster location and comparative obscurity around town with a bright, clean establishment, its walls blanketed with photos of loyal customers. The service was what one would expect from a takeout only, counter service operation: quick and marginally personable, keeping you there no longer than you want to be. Outpost's menu is surprisingly diverse, including appetizers, salads, pastas, traditional Italian and Greek favorites, hot and cold sandwiches, the creatively badged "Wrap Pack," and pizza, backed by a brazen guarantee.

Pizza. Outpost's pizza is rather unsurprisingly very, very good (or else they'd be bled dry from buying other pizzas from around town for their dissatisfied customers). The crust is very thin and airy with a very unique flavor, cooked to crispy perfection without being too crusty or brittle. Outpost advertises their exclusive use of Grande cheese (the Wisconsin-based purveyor of the finest Italian cheeses money can buy) and it's evident, as the cheese had a unique, fresh taste that wasn't greasy or salty, and an amazingly gooey texture. We can't say the same about the sauce, however, as it was in short supply and from what we could gather, was painfully mediocre despite its alleged Brooklyn origins. The pie's temperature was adversely affected by the 12 minute long journey from Outpost to Pizza Tour HQ, but it held up well considering the circumstances. Our usual topping of choice, sausage, was very good and complementary to a very good pizza overall.

The bottom line. Outpost is takeout only and off the beaten path for most, but their pizza is certainly worth the drive, as it definitely comes through on its guarantee of being one of the better pies in town despite not living up to its impossibly lofty claims.

Establishment: 14/30
Pizza: 23/30
Hits the Spot: 8.5/10
Large Cheese: $10.75

AWARDS WON:

2009 – Best of West Side/South End

Located in Stamford's East Side on West Main Street, Antonio's Restaurant was a late entry on the Pizza Tour and unlike the other late entries, is an actual pizza restaurant. Considering the torrent of bar pies we've experienced lately, we were excited to take the Tour back to a true pizzeria for a change.

Establishment. Antonio's is exactly what you'd expect of a sit-down pizzeria with a few extra quirks that make it unique. After scoring a parking spot that wasn't chained up by the adjacent dry cleaner, we walked into the restaurant through a lattice tunnel reminiscent of the queuing area at It's a Small World to an instrumental rendition of The Moody Blues' "Nights in White Satin." When we weren't preoccupied playing Name that Tune with the ever changing pan flute Muzak offerings, we were very relaxed in a low-lit, clean, and comfortable dining room, eating basket upon basket of warm, free bread. An interesting, mysterious back room (party room?) also exists at Antonio's with fewer tables, plastic tablecloths, and what appears to be a dance floor accessible through a side door labeled "Steak Mix" (your guess is as good as ours). In any event, Antonio's menu consists of both Italian and Mexican specialties, thus providing a unique opportunity to order tacos with your pizza.

Pizza. Antonio's pizza is pretty good. The crust is relatively thick and very crunchy with a strong, yeasty flavor and a unique, slightly overpowering bite. The cheese was delightfully stringy in contrast with the crust's bold textures and was moderately flavorful without being very greasy at all as well. Unfortunately, the sauce did not complement the rest of the pie at all, as it was underflavored, underproportioned, and to be blunt, boring. Regardless, this scorching hot pie stayed as such throughout the meal and was rather filling (both clearly the results of the thick, crunchy crust slab). Our topping of choice, skimpily distributed sausage, was not one of the better ones we've had, exuding a considerable amount of grease and oil with very little flavor payoff. Overall, Antonio's pizza was rather good with some unique, not necessarily complementary texture components and a traditional flavor we haven't seen in a while.

The bottom line. Antonio's is a nice place to eat with a slightly quirky ambiance echoed by the mostly traditional but still unique pizza.

Establishment: 21/30
Pizza: 20/30
Hits the Spot: 6.5/10
Large Cheese: $9.95

Located at E. Gaynor Brennan Golf Course, Zody's 19th Hole has lineage dating back to the original 19th Hole, which closed in 2004, reopened with new owners after a city-mandated $1.3 million renovation as the pluckily named Fore Seasons, later changed names to Fore, then again to the Clubhouse Grill, before fizzling, dying, and rising from its own ashes as the aforementioned Zody's. After a five-year sabbatical, the original owners have returned triumphantly to their loyal fans as well as tired, sweaty golfers.

Establishment. Catering to a unique demographic, Zody's is accommodating to just about everyone with its separate dining room and lounge areas, outdoor seating, and full bar, thus drawing far more business than the abysmally designed parking lot can handle. The dining room is spacious and offers excellent views of the course while the lounge has more of a bar feel as it's a bit more cramped, often loud and rambunctious, and always crowded. While we can't speak for the service in the dining room, the lounge service was very quick, but not very personable or attentive. Zody's offers a diverse menu including pastas, sandwiches (as well as their Italian counterpart, the panini), wraps, salads, mouthwatering entrees, and of course, pizza.

Pizza. Zody's offers a 12" bar pie, which is convenient because anything larger wouldn't have fit on our tiny table in the lounge. Nevertheless, the crust was exceptionally good, being crispy, slightly chewy, and very flavorful with the perfect amount of char. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the sauce and cheese, as they fall rather disappointingly into the bar pie mold. The sauce was rather bland and in short supply atop this pizza, while the cheese, although somewhat flavorful, was nothing to write home about. However, this pie came to the table screaming hot and stayed as such through most of the meal while remaining perfectly intact, thus enabling us to suck it down in under 10 minutes, so there's something to be said about that. Our topping of choice, grilled chicken, added an interesting complementary texture (especially given the perfectly cooked and charred crust) but little flavor (it is chicken, after all). Overall, Zody's fits the mold of a bar pie and will satisfy an appetite, but it certainly doesn't stand out in a city so full of them.

The bottom line. Zody's is a very nice establishment with a respectable bar pie and a diverse, tempting menu that will almost certainly convince you to order something else.

Establishment: 21/30
Pizza: 19/30
Hits the Spot: 5.8/10
Large Cheese: $9.99 (12")

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.

Family owned and operated since 1947, Pellicci's has developed quite a following in Stamford since its inception over 60 years ago. Located amidst no-name liquor stores, a golden boxer statue and Lucy's Pizzeria, Pellicci's is clearly the diamond in the rough of Stamford's West Side.

Establishment. Pellicci's old world decor and spacious, low lit dining rooms set the precedent for a superb Italian restaurant. With plucky Italian music and checkered tablecloths abound, Pellicci's delivers an air of class in an otherwise dingy part of town with traditional ambiance, full table service (however slow), and the personal flair that only a family business can deliver. Equipped with a virtual arsenal of Italian specialties, this restaurant can cater to anyone in the mood for steaks, seafood, chicken, veal (all served as platters or family style), and of course, pizza.

Pizza. This pizza clearly combines good quality ingredients and homemade, tried and true recipes to make a stellar product. Pellicci's Neapolitan crust is perfectly cooked with just the right amount of char and crispiness, pairing well with perfectly portioned, delicious, stringy cheese (albeit a tad bland). Pellicci's truly shines with its sauce, quite obviously homemade and perfected as a pasta sauce over the course of the establishment's 60+ year run. While flavorful, the sauce is also very heavy and concentrated, overpowering the rest of the pie at times. Another highlight of this pizza was the meatball topping: an incredibly flavorful and blatantly handmade ingredient that scored perfectly across all of our judges. Despite the inherent quality of each ingredient, these flavors married in a lackluster fashion. However, this shortcoming was hardly enough to tarnish such a delicious pizza.

The bottom line. Pellicci's is an inviting Italian restaurant and while we're positive they have much more to offer than pizza, their pizza is still very, very good.

Establishment: 26/30
Pizza: 23/30
Hits the Spot: 7/10
Large Cheese: $11.95

Located on Stillwater Ave., Lucy's Pizza Parlor's harsh exterior may cause you to rethink your dining choice for the evening. You might be right, as Lucy's is a pizza parlor in name only and you will surely be taking out and eating at home. Regardless, Lucy's offers a unique product and specialty pies you're unlikely to come across at many other pizzerias.

Establishment. Lucy's Pizza Parlor clearly does not cater to the eat-in customer. Equipped with a Plexiglas shield and locked door between the counter and the waiting area, this pizza parlor seems to be very well prepared for anything short of a Gestapo-style ransacking. Needless to say, Lucy's is anything but warm and welcoming. Nonetheless, what we could gather about the service as our pizza was being slipped through a conveniently sized slot in the shield was more than favorable. In fact, Lucy's also has a very diverse menu, complete with the first (and presumably, only) Indian Spicy pizza we've seen on The Tour and shouldn't be judged by its cover so quickly.

Pizza. Lucy's pizza was one of the best looking pies we've seen. It's golden crust, perfectly browned cheese, and artful distribution of hot peppers made for a masterpiece of a pizza. That said, it was a bizarre but delightfully unique one to say the least. The crust had an odd, airy consistency (not unlike that of a sponge) yet remained crispy while the rather tasty cheese was served very crisp, forming a strange cheese shell that tended to cling to adjacent slices and tear them asunder. The sauce was also moderately flavorful. However, the texture was widely derided as its breadlike consistency was nothing like that of any respectable pizza any of us have ever tasted and negatively affected the overall product. It was weird. Strangely, everything came together to make a halfway decent pie that defied our better judgment.

The bottom line. Lucy's Pizza Parlor will make you feel as if you've taken your life into your own hands, but Lucy's pizza is decent albeit highly unconventional.

Establishment: 9/30
Pizza: 17/30
Hits the Spot: 7/10
Large Cheese: $11.25

AWARDS WON:

2009 – Most Bulletproof

Only open since February 1st of this year, Westover Pizza is easily the newest pizza restaurant on our tour and a welcome addition to Stamford's robust pizza selection. Westover boasts its affiliations with both John the Baker and Michael's, bringing to mind some of the better pies in town and setting some high expectations to say the least.

Establishment. With an obvious lean towards take-out, Westover Pizza has a very small dining room that can accommodate 2-3 small parties at best with no restrooms to speak of. However, they make more than due with what they have with sparkling clean tables, a delightful staff, a considerably large menu, and a glorious vaulted ceiling that doubles as pizza box storage. Westover competes valiantly with full-fledged pizza restaurants and was surprisingly accommodating given its small size.

Pizza. Westover's pizza is pretty good. The char on their perfectly thin, New York style crust couples very well with above average quality cheese on a screaming hot pizza. However, we felt that there was a bit too much sauce on our pie and that the excess of sauce was largely underwhelming in terms of flavor. Judges' heads butted with regard to the pizza's texture, as it was less crisp than most we've had but as perfectly cooked as a NY/Italian style pie could be (see: Ridgeway). Suffice it to say, this disagreement is merely a matter of taste. Westover clearly puts out an above average product and will work hard to make its way into Stamford's pizza landscape as a new favorite.

The bottom line. Westover Pizza is the new guy in town and there's no reason not to welcome them to the neighborhood by enjoying a very good pizza, hot out of their oven.

Establishment: 18/30
Pizza: 20/30
Hits the Spot: 7/10
Large Cheese: $11.95

J & D's is located somewhat off the beaten path on Fairfield Ave. This shouldn't dissuade you however, because they offer online ordering, free delivery, and breakfast, lunch, and dinner options. While their pizza is very good, you'd be hard pressed not to find something else on their extensive menu that will suit your taste as well.

Establishment. J & D's has a smallish dining room with enough space to fit a handful of small parties (3-4 people) comfortably and an outdoor patio that we were unfortunately unable to enjoy in the lion stages of March. Most aspects of this establishment were slightly above average, however they really won us over with complementary buffalo wings and drinks with the purchase of a large pizza. Eat your collective hearts out, complementary bread-giving restaurants, the bar has been raised. J & D's also has a very diverse menu ranging from burgers and salads to falafels and gyros as well as pizza (naturally). This, coupled with an extraordinarily kind, attentive, and accommodating staff made the overall J & D's experience a very good one.

Pizza. J & D's has all the makings of a very good pizza. The crust is buttery and crispy without being overcooked and dry throughout, the cheese is delicious and generously proportioned, and the sauce is flavorful (albeit tasting canned). The pie remained very hot throughout the meal and despite being a Greek-style pizza, was cut into slices the right way! The topping of choice (sausage) tended to cook down into little (very flavorful) grease saucers, but that's hardly enough to tarnish an otherwise excellent pie.

The bottom line. J & D's offers a very good pizza, stellar service, and wings that beat the hell out of dinner rolls any day.

Establishment: 22/30
Pizza: 22/30
Hits the Spot: 8/10
Large Cheese: $10.95