888 N. County Road 260Buckle up. You’re about to inundated with pizza blogs.
I got sent to New York City for work last week. When the trip was first brought up, my bosses told me to get with my travel partner and work out flight details. I have a lot of gear when I travel and I hate flying with it. I have done it several times in the past and it’s a ton of stress.
So I asked if I could drive.
Yes, I would rather make an 11 drive by myself than fly with what I need for work. I told them to let the co-worker I was traveling with fly and I would meet her there.
I had a doctor’s appointment at 9 AM the day I was scheduled to leave and I didn’t really want to cancel. That took about an hour then I got on the road around 10 AM and started heading east.
I didn’t want to stop more than I needed to so I pushed back lunch for a while knowing I would hit some travel plazas on the Ohio Turnpike. I got to about halfway between Toledo and Cleveland before I couldn’t push it off anymore and I needed to get something to eat.
I chose the Sbarro at the Commodore Perry Travel Plaza outside of Clyde, Ohio on the Ohio Turnpike. This is the service area on I-80 at mile marker 100 in Sandusky County. I love these turnpike travel plazas. They’re so much better than the non-toll road rest areas. There is always a gas station, bathrooms, vending machines, some kind of convenience store and of course, a food court.
I hit the bathroom first and grabbed another bottle of Pepsi from the vending machine before finding my way to the food court.
All of the travel plazas have different food options. This one usually has a Burger King but it was closed for remodeling. There’s also an Auntie Ann’s and Sbarro.
I’m not going to lie. I picked this travel plaza for the food court just so I could make a stupid joke on social media. I hadn’t really told anyone other than those who needed to know that I was driving to New York. Again…just because I had this stupid joke planned out and didn’t want to spoil it.
Y’all remember the season two episode of The Office episode where Michael went to New York? Yeah, this quote, ““Oh, look! A Sbarro. My favorite New York pizza joint. And I’m going to go get me a New York slice!”
I couldn’t resist. I snapped a picture of myself then tweeted out, “8 hours from New York and I already found “New York’s Best Slice”” I know…it’s bad..but I had to.
Anyway, back to the blog.
The Sbarro at this travel plaza is part of the food court. A food court like you would find at any mall back in the 80’s and 90’s…where I used to live off Sbarro slices while playing The Simpsons in the nearby arcade.
The shop takes up two spaces with a large glass warming area with those famous slices.
There is also an area with breadsticks and Stromboli’s if you want something more than just a New York slice.
I asked for two slices of pepperoni. They put each slice on to it’s own little metal tray that was way too small for the big slice of pizza. They then took those metal trays and put them in to a little, very little, conveyor pizza oven to be warmed back up. This is way different than the traditional way of doing it by throwing them back in to the multi-layered, narrow doored pizza ovens.
The cost for the two slices was just under $12 and it took less than five minutes to get the slices each in their own pizza slice shaped box.
I grabbed a couple of packets of red pepper flakes off the counter then headed back to the car. I considered sitting down for a few minutes and just scarfing them down. There was a pretty large seating order that, again, looked like any food court you would have seen back in the olden days of the 90’s, but I didn’t want to waste much time. I still had about 7 hours to go.
The pizza from Sbarro is always pretty surprising. It gets crapped on a lot because of it’s place in the culinary world as a kind of generic New York pizza chain due to it being in pretty much every mall food court in the world at one time. Since I was literally going from this Sbarro to Manhattan, I knew I would have a pretty good idea of what a NY slice should taste like.
The pizza was quite as crispy as the slices that I got once I got to NYC but the flavor was really good. The sauce was much sweeter and a little more spicier than anything I had the rest of the week (don’t worry, there are several blog posts coming).
I mentioned earlier, I grew up on this stuff…and that’s not me being dramatic. I always saved my money for Sbarro when we went to the mall. We were cheap eats chain people growing up….and that’s a memory from childhood that I actually love. Name a fast food restaurant, I have a story about it. Things are different now. We eat a lot more on the go so even though we stop at fast food quite a bit, we don’t sit down inside. There are no salad bars or piles of roast beef sandwiches for $5….and there’s not a lot of trips to the mall for arcade games and pizza.
It’s rare now for me to find a Sbarro let alone actually get a slice of pizza from them. But when I do, it always brings back those memories from Northfield Square Mall.