Allow me to take you back to a scene last November (of 2022): I'm miserably on the Queen streetcar running late for work (thanks to said streetcar) and just staring out the window in hopes of relieving my growing anxiety about this unbearable situation. This is why I bike in the winter when I can, folks. Despite my internal screaming the car lingers at Parliament and Queen for abnormally long, and through the window on my right I spot something: a new pizza joint.
Fast forward almost a year, and various circumstances found me hungry and in that particular neighbourhood. Wood 900 had indeed been on my Big List of Pizzas To Try since that initial discovery, but like a good nine tenths of that massive list I hadn't been in a huge hurry to seek them out.
You walk in and the interior is not typical of a pizza place... more like a cheap diner disguised as a fancy restaurant. The entrance is dim aside from some neon, and then the actual inside sticks to a fairly basic colour scheme. Not an insult, for the record... there's nothing unappealing about it beyond it's stark simplicity. If not for well over a dozen booth tables you'd think this was just a large well lit dive bar, and perhaps it was previously.
To my delight, in 2023 dollars the prices here are extremely reasonable. I'm not sure I can ever recall a wood-fired pizza at this low a price point... even eleven years ago when I worked at the Ossington Pizzeria Libretto their pizzas cost more than Wood 900's offerings do now. Certainly a curious eyebrow raiser, but no matter. In I went for their two topping special... tax and tip later it was fifteen bucks. Like stepping into a time machine!
The place was also nearly empty on a Friday night (hmmm) but they were getting a bunch of orders on the phone. Indeed, during my brief time inside an Uber delivery driver got rebuked for not arriving with a proper bag.
My two toppings were spicy salami and mushrooms, and immediate positive points for using mushrooms with some moisture to them. I talked about this in my review of Ambassador, but as delicious as mushrooms are on pizza one problem I constantly encounter is how they dry out and wither in the oven. So having mushrooms here with an agreeable, juicy texture was a very pleasant surprise. The flavour? Fairly lacking of that rich, wonderful earthiness you normally expect... these are semi-watery and I suspect previously frozen.
The spicy salami, however, I quite enjoyed a lot. Finely sliced, not oozing with grease, with a nice little kick of sting just to let you know it's there. Solid stuff. As for the cheese... fairly standard mozzarella I'd say. Enjoyably gooey, with some of the waxiness you get from cheaper cheeses (and lacking the delectable soft buttery taste you get from the really good stuff. So far... with okay-ish mushrooms, enjoyable salami and mediocre mozzarella... pretty all right I'd say.
You're probably thinking, as I was... come on now. This is a wood-fired pizza coming in at almost half the price as almost any other of that style in the city. There has to be a horrible catch! Indeed. Not horrible, mind you (or me I guess, considering how I framed that)... but this pie has some glaring shortcomings and the main culprit is the bread.
There is some nice char, but aside from that it tastes of nothing but dryness. The bottom of the pizza is excessively dusty, like to the point it coats your fingers after a few bites. This can happen depending on the type of oven, and with a stellar pizza it's a mere inconvenience rather than an irritating nuisance. But really, the issue is how much this bland crust feels chalky and dehydrated in the mouth. It's less noticeable in the center of the pizza, where the cheese and toppings are doing the work (in fact, the slightly droopy texture in those parts is extremely nice)... but when you start taking bites of the outer edges, the true quality reveals itself.
The sauce isn't much to talk about either. It's at the level of your generic, store bought canned fare. Tiny bit of sugary sweetness, which again sorta works on the cheesier bites... but it's very meh. Another issue was the reheat: I used the frying pan on low heat and slightly covered it (to lock in even more of the moisture), but even executing that considered step could not save this crust from drying out even further. It didn't translate well on second heating... most of the flavours were more muted and the awful bread crumbled apart in staleness. Didn't even eat those bits.
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Overall. The biggest "bad" of this pizza stands out the most: it's an unappealing, flavourless dusty crust that might be one of the least pleasant I've encountered in my many pizza travels (at least, not counting the worst of the big pizza chains). It's a glaring weakness that drags this down pretty significantly, because otherwise there's rather a fair bit of charm to this. It's a cheap wood-fired pizza that does its best with the limited quality it has, and when fresh I enjoyed about 75 percent of it. They get the droopy, gooey feel of a wood-fire pie quite right, and while the flavours suffer on the reheat that foldable texture mostly remained.
It's a tough one to grade. They're far from a "must try", but I had more moments of positivity here than I did with say, District Pizza... which for just two slices was significantly more expensive than Wood 900. Lets say.... Wood 900 gets a "C++". If they had even mediocre dough this is easily a couple grades higher, but alas. An admirable effort.
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