Midtown Lunch

As the breakup of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War peeled back the veneer of Socialist Paradise, an underbelly of barely functioning economics and crumbling infrastructure laid bare after years of neglect, we now see the aftermath of the Pizza Wars take its toll. When jenfjen and I reviewed Pizza King, (on 6th btw. 37+38th) we were a bit unhappy as to the results and questions of where the corners were cut to drive the slice price to 75 cents came from. The Department of Health recently shut down the erstwhile $1 slice competitor and as we would see a Kazakh nuclear facility in 1993, we now see the pizza-crusted underbelly.

I’ve charged into a C-rated joint with pleasantly surprising results and cringed at the horrors of a B-rated restaurant, but my stomach turned a bit when I saw that Pizza King’s parent operation slung Indian street food and Latin American-style fare alongside their cheapza and was reported shuttered by a Midtown Lunch reader. They’d racked up some real all-stars when I looked them up this morning on the DoH’s restaurant rating site. The top stomach-churners being:

-Food worker does not wash hands thoroughly after using the toilet, coughing, sneezing, smoking, eating, preparing raw foods or otherwise contaminating hands.
-Evidence of rats or live rats present in facility’s food and/or non-food areas.
-Live roaches present in facility’s food and/or non-food areas.

Surprisingly, when I went to check it out, they were back up and in business again. The pizza part looks like the sole impact – as you can see, their Slice-o-Rama era multiple offerings have been exponentially scaled back. Naught but one plain slice was out and few were in the process. I mean, those ovens were EMPTY!

If a really, really bad $1 slice wasn’t enough to send you literally right next door to 2 Bros or across the street to the single best $1 slice in Midtown at Joey Pepperoni, then let the inspection report speak for itself. Since this is their first inspection by the DoH’s new system, we can’t tell if this is systematic but for a place cranking out so much food at such cheap prices, I think I wouldn’t be surprised if future violations included some of those really icky ones. Let’s see what transpires over time after this bloody nose of an inspection and swift re-opening…

If you go back if/when Pizza King reopens, do yourself a favor and check DoH before you go. You may want to take your $1 elsewhere, and that elsewhere is too close by to ignore.