Well…there is one phrase that comes to mind when I experience something like what I did at Nicli Antica Pizzeria…”The emperor has no clothes.”
Remember that fable? Nobody wants to be the first to say the emperor is striding around naked because they are afraid they are the only ones missing something, and feel obligated to agree with what everyone else is saying…
Okay, enough rambling.
Nicli Antica has been raved about for a while. The latest push I got to try it came from the Georgia Straight paper’s Golden Plates Awards, Readers’ Choice.
I was pretty excited about it. And as they say, pizza is like sex…even when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good.
I can officially say it is possible to eff up pizza.
How? I don’t know. I don’t even cook, and I can throw some stuff on a crust and have it taste good. Somehow my $60 lunch (no booze) ended up displeasing two of us at once.
On the plus side: the place is pretty nice inside…trendy, stylish, what have you. Which I think is the reason people somehow feel like the food is actually better than it is…maybe?
Photo source: bcbusinessonline
The appetizer was pretty good too! Burrata cheese with some yummy stuff to accompany it.
Photo source: gastrophoria.blogspot.com — this is NOT the actual one we ate. And it’s not an egg — that’s burrata cheese.
Since the appy was so nice, we can be forgiven for expecting the pizza to wow us.
Okay, first off, I asked how big the things were because I really just wanted to split one (costly). The waiter said they were too small to share. Uh, yeah…maybe if you are a grizzly bear. They’re pretty damn huge. Way to make me spend more than I needed to.
So that kinda bugged me.
Anyway…garlic. I’m personally of the opinion a little goes a long way. But…apparently this place disagrees because they somehow felt it necessary and/or acceptable to put entire CLOVES on the thing, without chopping them at all. Entire cloves!
Speaking of not chopping… the pizzas (which were like nine or 10 inches across or something) were NOT CUT!! No slices! We had to use knife and fork to cut through a very tough crust. I hurt my hand a little, I kid you not.
I had the pesto. It sucked, frankly. There’s no other way to deny it. It was bland and oily, and it was hard to manoeuvre around the garlic (did I mention there were entire CLOVES on it?).
My guest had something involving some sort of meat…the restaurant’s website is too slow right now to wait for the menu to load to refresh my memory. Anyway, he was really disappointed, and I ended up eating his leftovers. The pizza was so hard the next day I nearly chipped a tooth. Unreal.
So, gotta disagree with all the hype here.
Having said that, of course I’d give it another go…until then…blech.
