This Week In Pizza: Cherry's High Dive

 

 

(Not to be confused with another "Cherry" named place I also recently reviewed... twice)

 

Flashback to that first week of November, 2024. Dear god... holy f**king f**k shit F**KK.

Nightmare November (2024 Edition) didn't begin quite so grotesquely. 

Saturday the 2nd was a wonderfully jam packed day: sunny and seemingly the entire city of Toronto was out enjoying it, myself included. A friendly game of baseball played in the morning, that evening in the building for the emotional chapter-closing of Vince Carter's jersey (rightfully) ascending to the Scotiabank Arena rafters. Between all this (time and location-wise) there was a late lunch to be had on the run and Cherry's High Dive was the call.

Speaking of calling... these Cherry High Divers do not answer their phone! Time was slightly tight, what with the working Vinsanity's jersey retirement and all... and so my plan was to call ahead and pick up my pizza. Nope. All I got was an automated blah blah blah about where and who they are, without any option to place an order. Whatever... I was determined and hungry, so off route I went to knock on their door.

 

 

Cherry's High Dive is... well sort of half my "kind of place" and also very much half "not my kind of place" whatsoever. Remember that bit on The Simpsons where all these new establishments open on Springfield's boardwalk, even a "new" Moe's Tavern? But with Moe's, the dude who wanders in says "This isn't faux dive... this is a dive!" Cherry's High Dive is very much a faux dive (unlike Moe's) with it's saloon-like interior of wooden panels and dim lighting... but it's all too smooth and precise rather than with any actual character. 

I don't much like this kind of thing to begin with, as somebody who has frequented many true dive bars in my time (you can tell). You can't simulate or re-create the random and often dirty energy of such a place. Making it warm and comfortable, yeah no shit comfort is an obvious move... but it does come off as fake. This isn't two prostitutes fighting on the sidewalk in front of you while you and your buddy stand in the doorway chatting, while your buddy's buddy you just met is desperately looking for an 8-ball but is also broke... like I said I know dive bars and some I've seen occupy more of the "yikes" part of my memory. Those are like a "deep dive bar" and aren't really fun either... unless you like warm pints of Molson Ice (even in my youth I knew better and stuck to bottles at such places).

We're here to talk pizza regardless, and a former co-worker of mine told me Cherry's had some solid pie... which (as a certified Pizza Fiend) is good enough for me to go try a place. Going into this I knew they did a "tavern style pizza" which is essentially a very thin pizza cut into a bunch of tiny square slices. 

Funny enough, I often lament the lack of any Chicago style pizza here in Toronto... but this "tavern" (or "party style" as it also called) is also a style of pie with origins in Chicago! I'd love to have more to say about the origin of this style whenever/if I review Danny's Pizza Tavern (I am only one man with one stomach) but for now lets just imagine a bunch of Chicagoans sick of eating those deep dish cushions of cheese and sauce and saying "Ahhhr that's enough ar'this!" and creating the deep dish's exact opposite. You can hear the accents in your mind, don't deny it.  

 

        

I got Cherry High Dive's Hawaiian, mostly because none of the other options were all that appealing (I was hoping for something, anything, a bit more unique) plus an additional side of their garlic dip.

Which, brings me to my first and perhaps biggest issue here: considering the thinness of this pizza, it's not especially large circumference... this is not a lot of food, full stop. Yet... with the dip (and tip, always tip please) we're coming in around thirty bucks here. If this is supposed to be a "party style"... well this is a damn lame party, dude. My baseball playing lads would need like to share like twenty of these between eight of them.

Whatever right? You've got 16 mini slices here, perfect for a small group to pick away at, or satisfy the hunger of a single maniac pizza reviewer. Hell, Rob Baker of the Tragically Hip walked past me while I was eating this outside of Roy Thomson Hall, pretty sure it was him. All this makes sense in theory, sure... except:

 

   

Had to use the exterior of my previous job for context, but yeah! These aren't slices, they're goddamn crackers. Those are my actual fingernails for crying out loud, and I feel like they'd still be hungry after this slice. 

Look, I'm not rich or anything but I am cool dropping 30 bucks on a pie once in a while for this endless pizza mission and review show (don't forget to "like" and smash that "subscribe" button!!!!111)... but geez can you give me something here that resembles bang for my hard earned buck? 

The teenage version of me would've eaten this entire pizza in 45 seconds and then fried up some double cheeseburgers. Without the garlic dip (itself a hefty four bucks) this was still 26 bucks (with tip, always tip please). 26! I usually don't rant about this kind of thing but come.... on. My issue isn't totally the price either... it's the absolute lack of actual food here! And this High Dive pie isn't some fine dining fancy dish meant to be savoured and "close your eyes and let the flavours bring you into a new state of consciousness" kind of thing. It's (spoiler) like Pizza Nova level of quality. The better side of big pizza chains. Really? What are we doing here? This is a special case indeed. Call it the hipster tax I suppose. 

Okay okay okay, so Cherry's High Dive is clearly the opposite of a bargain... but what about the pizza itself? Maybe the quality is worth the hipster tax. Despite it's physics being nearly two dimensional... if the pizza is actually strong, robust and enjoyable... I will evaluate it almost entirely on those specific merits.  

 

    

I am a harsh critic, what with trying like 170 Toronto pizzas at this point... but I'm also fair and if a pizza really jumps out at me I will give it that well deserved respect. 

Cherry's High Dive... yeah no offense but... also no respect. 

You can see it's overcooked around the edges, perhaps on purpose perhaps not... which I don't mind as it toes that tricky line between burnt and crispy quite well. Texture is the only notable thing here: these bite sized pizza slices are enjoyable in their conciseness. The cracker-like crunch on the other edges kinda works, sometimes... but also gets repetitive in flavour and texture very quickly. The dip is absolutely necessary to eat those outer edges, otherwise those crusts are getting left behind.  

As far as anything substantial in terms of flavour with this pizza... meh. Barely any hint of whatever the sauce is while the ham and pineapple do what ham and pineapple do (the ham has some solid salty kick to it and is good quality in juiciness). It's really the soft dough (or crunch on the outer slices) combined with the cheese that makes this work. 

Taste-wise it's all so... blah. I wasn't expecting them to invent a hover car or anything, but the flavours here are so common and uninspired. There's no kick to this, nothing remotely memorable in the tastes and nothing lingers. 

The texture is fantastic, I'll give it that... the good crunch mixed with the doughy soft slices in the centre like a Pixies-like soft/loud dynamic (hipster tax)... but that's all there is here. Part of me wonders if that's why people have been so fond of these envelope-thin, overpriced mediocre pies. "But it does these two different things at once! And the place is so cool." Maybe it does, and maybe it is... but I felt real damn out of place waiting for this thing and I've had countless pizzas far more interesting than this one... 

...though maybe I ordered the wrong pizza? Have at me, hipsters! Should've gotten the one with goat cheese*, fiddleheads and marinated lamb nostril... damn it!

 

(*jokes aside goat cheese rules on pizzas, an all time fav)

 

 

At this point... it should be obvious I am very very unimpressed. With basically everything I've encountered here, actually. And that is true. I was very, very unimpressed. This pizza is a step up from one of those artisan super thin frozen ones the supermarket will sell... and it is a short step. 

The garlic dip though! Yeah... more of a whipped cream with a garlic hint than anything. That I will actually forgive: I personally like my garlic robust, intrusive and loud... which doesn't work for most other people and so leaning into a more sour creamy flavour is understandable. Objectively, as a dip it's totally fine. Probably better with a thicker crust considering the super-duper thin texture of this pizza, which probably demands a thicker more blue cheesy-like dip (like with chunks of blue in there). 

At an extra four dollars for this dip? And here we go again... good lord who has this kind of money to just waste on such "okayish" things? Although well... there isn't enough pizza here for all that dip so this price actually makes total sense now....

 

 

Overall. Well I gotta think about it for a-secon-no! No no no. No! Definitely not. 

I do not recommend Cherry's High Dive, at least for pizza. It's rather painful how unimpressive this is. Like they nailed the precise level juuust above decent, settled there, and slapped a downtown price on it. Unimaginative, basic in execution and flavour, not satisfying, no particular aspect that stands out, and also rubbery on the reheat.     

Is this a quality pizza? I suppose, though it pushes the lower end of that boundary. There is an endless flow of far worse pizzas, and I should mention there wasn't anything in the pie itself that flavour-wise harshly offended me. But... nothing sparked any excitement either. Just... here it is. Generic in its okayness. 

Cherry's High Dive is distant from exceptional and considering the price... this is among the hardest of passes. At least some of the really terrible chain places have specials that are twice as much pizza and cost half as much, and this High Dive pizza is objectively much closer to them than to any of the really good ones I've had.  

On quality they barely get a 'C+' but considering the rest (experience, price, not answering their phone twice for pick up, condescending hipster vibes) I'm giving a 'C' and a very weak one. Don't believe them social medias hyping this fraudulence ("Top 50 Pizza in Toronto?" What the fu*k are you smoking?) this is as 'meh' a pizza as they come. Avoid.