Beware, the ovens have eyes. 2 slices plus 2 slices equals five. Big Brothers Pizza is watching you.
Now that we've gotten the necessary jokes out of the way, Big Brothers pizza! This is actually a mini-chain of sorts: along with their Kingston Road location (which I visited), deeper into Scarborough they have another outpost on Morningside Avenue... and it also appears they have a third location all the way in St. Catharines? Certainly no risk of territorial overlap there.
Even with three stores Big Brothers is fairly new to the pizza scene, having first opened their doors in 2017. There's a link on their website that reads "School Pizza", an option I'm confident I haven't seen before. Basically it takes you to a form asking if your school would be interested in having Big Brothers cater for a scholastic event. Unusual for a company to be so specific, but honestly it makes a lot of business sense.
Getting into the pizza itself, as you can see I went for a slice instead of a full fresh pie. I have my reasons, primarily that I haven't worked very much this month but also! None of their full pizza creations seemed all that unique or interesting, and this slice was opportunistically very fresh from the oven as I arrived.
This is their "Canadian" slice, which like most places is some combination of pepperoni, mushrooms, and bacon (I've seen it with ham before as well). I'm genuinely curious: why is this slice called a "Canadian"? What is the origin of this? My surface-level internet research yielded no definitive answers, beyond it may have just been a 1970s/80s corporate idea that everybody jumped aboard with. However it came about, it's a good combination so no complaints.
Big Brothers pizza is... very okay. First off I loved the smell: walking out with this hot slice on a slightly breezy day... the scent of oily, crispy pepperoni rising to my nostrils... it always reminds me of the excitement I'd feel as a child when pizza was on the dinner horizon. On first few bites, it's a very bready pie... a lot of thick white bread taste to it, which would get annoying quickly but there is some crisp to the bottom of it.
I like how they use bacon strips, which keeps this slice from being a salt fest had it been bacon crumble, and the mushrooms actually have some softness to them. The bacon is juicy, the pepperoni crisp on the edges... the overall texture of this pizza is definitely a positive, a fine sensation when eating it.
That's important because in terms of flavour? Not a whole lot here. Nothing unpleasant, just that every bite drifts into sameyness. The flavours all blend together into "tastes like generic decent pizza". None of the elements, sauce, cheese or toppings, really have anything that stands out... in fact it's that bready taste you notice most and that's just because the majority of this slice was the dough (the cheese layer on top is very thin).
Overall. Kind of like a "pizza by the numbers" experience. No major strengths or weaknesses, and nothing particularly stands out about it. Very forgettable, I'm sad to say... the type of pizza we've all had probably dozens of times and get them confused with one another. Since this is still pizza we're talking about... even at this level of 'unremarkable' it makes for a perfectly decent snack, and it held up well on the reheat in the toaster oven. I wouldn't recommend rushing to your nearest Big Brothers right this moment, but I'll still give them a lower side "C++" mostly for a decent baseline of quality.
No comments:
Post a Comment