March 10th, 2017
West Haven, CT
in my previous post, I mentioned that Eric and I had an original list of pizza places in New Haven county that we tried to eat at a couple of years ago. Well, one of the places that we went to was Mike’s Apizza. When we saw the addition of Mike’s on the 2016 list, we didn’t realize that we had been there before. Eric realized that we had already been as we were driving there for dinner last Friday night on our way up to Boston.
The first time we went to Mike’s, we were not impressed. The pizza was decent, but nothing special, and nothing like the great New Haven pies. We don’t remember exactly what we got, but I think we split a large one-topping pizza. Even though we don’t remember the details of the pizza, we did remember the horrible service. We were seated in a corner table, and our server pretty much forgot about us after seating us, and then also after finally delivering our pizza. We know that New Haven pizzerias don’t have the friendliest reputations, but this was just so bad.
In the pursuit of fairness, we decided to give Mike’s another try. It had to have made the list for some reason, so maybe we were judging unfairly in our original assessment.
We ended up ordering two pizzas here, both smalls. One was the traditional tomato pie, and one was a one-topping with mushrooms. We are glad to say that the service was much better this time around, but maybe because the restaurant wasn’t so busy. The pizzas came out piping hot, and we were pleasantly surprised by the tomato pie. The crust was stiffer than a traditional New Haven pizza, so it held up well to all the sauce and the generous sprinkling of grated cheese. The mushroom pie was less exciting. It wasn’t anything special to remember, although it did taste good.
So, I guess the take-home point here is that if you are in New Haven, want a decent tomato pie, and feel like driving all the way out to West Haven, you could go to Mike’s. We wouldn’t go out of our way for any of the other pizzas here, though, and we’d rank it very close to the bottom of our New Haven pizza list.
We didn’t manage to hit any pizza places up in Boston, unfortunately. We had plans to hit one in Providence on the way home, but we had to cut the trip a bit short because our dog decided to eat an entire bowl of Hershey’s kisses while we were away. Just means we’ll have another excuse to take a road trip!
To visit:
Mike’s Apizza and Restaurant
111 Campbell Ave
West Haven, CT 06516
We had been to Zuppardi’s out in West Haven early on in the “original pizza quest”, but we weren’t really impressed. We were looking forward to seeing how it compared now, after a few more years of eating pizza.
