1908 W. Main SteetI took the family down to St. Louis this summer and I learned something. I like St. Louis pizza. While I was at a baseball game with my dad, my brother, and a friend, J and the kids ordered a pizza from Imo’s and it was delicious. When I blogged about Imo’s, someone mentioned Kazoopy’s did a St. Louis style pizza. I had forgotten about it until just recently when I drove by the new Kazoopy’s location and remembered, “damn, I need to try this.”
Kazoopy’s Pizza recently opened their second location in Kalamazoo and their second location on West Main Street. The new shop is in the Westwood area of Kalamazoo Township near North Clarendon Street where Pizza Hut used to be until they moved to the other side of the auto repair shop right next door.
The restaurant is pretty small with only a couple of tables in a small dining area. The front of the building is dominated by glass and you can see in to the shop from the road. It’s an interesting look to the building. Not sure what the space was used for before Pizza Hut but it doesn’t even look most Pizza Huts that I have seen.
Most of the business is done either carry-out or delivery, but it is possible to sit an eat if that’s what you’re in the mood for.
I didn’t really tell J where I was ordering from when I ordered. She had asked me to run to Walgreens to pick something up for the baby and Walgreens just happened to be on my way if I went to Kazoopy’s. She wasn’t opposed to the idea, but was expecting something from one of our usual places.
Kazoopy’s has online ordering for both locations which made my job easier. I still hate calling in pizza orders. It’s stupid…I know, but I hate it.
I really wanted to try the St. Louis style pizza, but again, I was going to be springing something on J. I know she liked Imo’s, but we kinda have a thing with Cottage Inn when it comes to delivery. I decided to order two pizzas. I got 14″ St. Louis style with pepperoni and a 12″ cheeseburger deluxe. I always have to order some kind of bread sticks to just because we like cheesy bread sticks. I added on an order of eight piece Goofy Bread and garlic butter dipping sauce. The cost came to around $30 which I paid for online.
The confirmation email told me I had about a half hour until the pizzas would be ready, but I still had to make that Walgreens stop. L and I loaded up in my car to make the trip. Even with the stop, we were about five minutes early when we pulled in to the tiny parking lot, so we took a seat at one of the tables and told “jokes” until our pizzas were boxed up and we were on our way home.
The bacon cheeseburger deluxe pizza was supposed to be mostly for me, but I had to dig in to the St. Louis style first. There are two things that really make a pizza a St. Louis Style pizza. One is the cracker thin crust made without yeast. The other is the processed cheese known as Provel. I’m not an expert on this style of pizza. In fact, the only other time I had it was in St. Louis and I ate it cold that night, but I really liked Kazoopy’s offering. The Provel cheese has it’s own unique flavor even though it’s essentially just a combination of cheddar, provolone, and Swiss. We are fans of thin crust pizza and not using a leavening agent makes it about as thin as you can get it. I don’t know if J was on board, but I really liked this pizza. It really does stick out from anything else available in town and it’s the offering that really makes Kazoopy’s unique.
I ate of a few slices of the pepperoni pizza then opened up the box for the Bacon Cheeseburger Deluxe. These two pizzas weren’t even comparable. The regular crust on this pizza really did nothing for me. It was kind of bland and pretty chewy. The pizza was topped with beef, onion (left off), tomato, bacon, and cheeseburger sauce in addition to the typical four cheeses that come on all pizzas. I think it was the cheeseburger sauce that really did it for me on this one. I don’t know what it was. It was white, and that kind of turned me off. White sauces usually indicate mayo and whether this actually was or not, didn’t really matter. It looked like it and that’s what I associated it with. I would have been good with regular pizza sauce. I still ended up eating the whole pizza eventually. It wasn’t bad, I just wouldn’t order it again.
That brings us to the Goofy Bread. This delicious side is the bread sticks covered in garlic butter and Parmesan. We got a couple cups of garlic butter dipping sauce to go along with the garlic butter that was already on the bread. It’s not hard to imagine why the Goofy Bread tastes so good. It has three of my favorite toppings for things, garlic, butter, Parmesan, and we were dipping it in even more garlic butter. Speaking of the garlic butter, I’m inclined to think they make their own because this is much thicker and much more flavorful than the stuff that comes from the national competitors. We made sure to soak up as much of that liquid deliciousness as we could before we ran out of bread.
The St. Louis Style pizza at Kazoopy’s is definitely a winner. I will be ordering that one again and again and again and again, etc., etc. The specialty was a miss for me, but we really prefer thin crust pizzas, so that’s not something that others should be afraid of. We kind of live right in the middle of the two Kazoopy’s so we need to make more of an effort to throw that St. Louis style pizza into our rotation instead of just doing what we normally do.
