Dining Out: Pizza crawl to five crowd-favourite Ottawa purveyors finds winning pies and a dud or two

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Colonnade Pizza (downtown location)
280 Metcalfe St., 613-237-3719, colonnadepizza.com

KS on the Keys
1029 Dazé St., 613-521-0498, ksonthekeys.com

Pizza Nerds (Centretown)
478 Bank St., 613-433-3489, pizzanerds.ca

Tangerine Pizza
969 Cummings Ave., 613-745-2525, tangerinepizza.com

Tennessy Willems
1082 Wellington St. W., 613-722-0000, twpizza.squarespace.com

Pizza lovers heeded the call last month when I asked them to tell me about local pizza joints that I needed to try.

After it was posted online, my roundup of five years’ worth of pizza-related reviews prompted 20 commenters to leave recommendations. Another 30 pizza fans emailed me to mention favourites of theirs that I had overlooked.

This column, then, is my two cents about the five pizza purveyors that were most often mentioned in the suggestions that I received. I’ll start what amounts to a basic recap of the evolution of pizza in Ottawa with that culinary institution, Colonnade Pizza, a runaway favourite of my respondents.

Colonnade

More than a pizzeria, Colonnade is a brand. Its original downtown location on Metcalfe Street has been slinging pies since 1967, and Peter Dahdouh, son of original owner Kalil Dahdouh, has overseen Colonnade’s franchising so that there are four more Colonnades further flung from downtown in Ottawa.

Colonnade serves what one of its recommenders told me was “a good, thick, heavy, lots-of-cheese, Ottawa-style pizza.” Indeed, older Ottawans, and I include myself among them, should be sentimentally attached to the massive, daunting Colonnade pies of their youths, which ruled Ottawa’s pizza scene before the thin-crust revolution of more recent decades.

The last time this newspaper reviewed Colonnade was in 1986, when Shirley Foley said Colonnade made pizza “as it should be: piping hot, lots of green pepper, pepperoni, mushrooms, runny cheese, with a crust that let you know who was boss, but did it without being tough.”

Almost 40 years later, I went this month with two colleagues. We opted for: the Colonnade special (sweet red peppers, onions, ham, broccoli); a Mediterranean pizza (black olives, feta cheese, sweet red peppers, artichokes); and a 50/50 split between a meat lover’s pie loaded with Italian sausage, pepperoni and bacon and a combination pizza (mushroom, pepperoni and green peppers).

When the pizzas arrived, they looked very similar, since Colonnade hides its toppings under a thick blanket of its signature cheese. In a 2017 column that feted Colonnade’s 50th anniversary, my then-colleague Kelly Egan divulged that the pizzeria uses brick cheese from Oak Grove Cheese Factory, just west of Kitchener, Ont.

Cheese, plus nostalgia, were the best things going for our three Colonnade pizzas. I thought all of the pizzas felt a little sauce-deprived, and only the meat-lover/combination was sufficiently seasoned. Also, the Colonnade special seemed soggier than its peers, and it shed a pool of moisture on its plate.

KS on the Keys

A second pizza outing took us to KS on the Keys, another five-decades-old veteran business. The late Kelly Swaita, who like Kalil Dahdouh emigrated from Lebanon to Canada, put the KS in KS on the Keys when he opened its original location at Bank Street and Albion Road in 1971. The website for the restaurant, now on Dazé Street, calls it the oldest business in South Keys.

Four of us went to KS on the Keys, where the ambience was as spacious and modern as the menu is family-friendly and middle-of-the-road.

We each had a pizza. I took the old-school KS (pepperoni, mushroom, green pepper, green olive), which was hefty, cheese-blanketed and better — more flavourful and blessed with molten cheese — than a comparable Colonnade pizza.

My dining companions, all women roughly half my age, eschewed the big, bready, cheese-topped pizzas depicted in the KS menu in favour of “gourmet pizza” options, which were nine-inch flatbreads with diverse toppings.

I had quibbles with each of those pizzas, which ranged in price between $21 and $24. The BBQ pizza (barbecue sauce, brick cheese, caramelized onions, chicken and cilantro) needed a better barbecue sauce and more caramelized onions. “The Garden of Eating” (a vegetarian pizza of garlic olive oil, cherry tomatoes, kalamata olives, artichoke, roasted peppers, onions and buffalo mozzarella) was nicely garlicky but otherwise felt a little bland. and the “Pizza Bianca” (white cream garlic sauce, chicken, kalamata olives, mushroom, spinach, cheese, and fresh arugula) was my favourite of the batch, but it was also a little soggy.

Crust-wise, the gourmet pizzas were fine, if not great. What was great, though, was KS’s coconut cream pie.

My pick of the four pizzas was the old-school KS, which I thought measured up best to what it was supposed to be. That my dining companions preferred the “gourmet” options after sampling them all may well speak to a generation gap.

Tangerine Pizza

I visited one more “older-school” pizzeria, Tangerine Pizza in Gloucester, because a reader wrote me that this mom-and-pop eatery grew many of its own vegetables.?That seemed to be true of the vegetable and bean soup that came as a side order with the two pizzas I took home. I could see that simple but fresh and flavourful soup making regulars of Tangerine’s customers all on its own.

As for those pizzas, one was fantastic, but the other one was awful.

The “Tangerine” pizza (mushrooms, pepperoni, bacon, green peppers, olives and tangerine sauce) was great, even after a 30-minute trip from the oven to my home dining room. All of its ingredients, and especially the zesty tomato sauce, sang.

But the seafood pizza (shrimp, scallops, crab and anchovies) was, in hindsight, ordered out of misguided optimism. While Steveston Pizza in Richmond, B.C., makes some great seafood pizzas, I was wrong to hope for something similar from an east-end Ottawa pizzeria. The pizza’s shrimp were small and still veined, its scallops were small and flavourless and its crab was of the shredded, fake kind. A few bites convinced me and my companion that calling this pizza “unpleasant” would have been kind. Certainly, all of Tangerine’s other pizzas must be better.

Tennessy Willems

Quite a few readers reminded me that I’d never reviewed Tennessy Willems. To be fair, the wood-fired pizza joint in Hintonburg was a favourite of mine since it opened in late 2010, almost two years before I took on this reviewing gig.

Tennessy Willems was one of Ottawa’s first artisanal thin-crust pizzerias, turning out true “gourmet” pizzas that were thin-crusted in a more North American, rather than Neapolitan style, basically meaning that they would be more rigid and less floppy.

I have fond memories of Tennessy Willems pizzas and I concur with what my predecessor, Anne DesBrisay, wrote in a 2011 review, when she praised them as “slender-crusted with a smoky, sourdough tang, puffy-edged, burbled and sooted from a supremely hot brick oven.”

My companions and I split four Tennessy Willems pizzas that for years have been stalwarts on the menu.

The wild boar pizza was a genius-level savoury-sweet-herby mix of local wild boar sausage, caramelized apple, sage pesto and two-year-old cheddar that should have a day named after it at City Hall. This pizza was my must-order in the early 2010s and we were told, not surprisingly, that it is the pizzeria’s most popular pie by a big margin.

I was fond too of the “Elmdale,” (house-made tomato sauce, spicy or mild Genoa salami, roasted peppers, cremini mushrooms and fior di latte), which was an optimized modern red-sauce pie. The “Bianco” (pear, walnuts, speck, fior di latte and gorgonzola) and “Helen’s” (baby spinach, parmesan, goat cheese, pine nuts, finished with lemon juice) epitomized North American, gourmet combinations of ingredients.

However, the crusts of three of four Tennessy Willems were a little disappointing, chewier than I would have liked. Only one pizza had the crisp, and lively crust that I prefer. That said, If toppings and combinations of toppings are what matter most to you, then you will think these pizzas are fabulous.

Pizza Nerds

The last stop of my pizza crawl was Pizza Nerds, which opened in Centretown in 2020. Like many of Ottawa’s newer pizzerias, Pizza Nerds, which has also spawned an Old Ottawa South location, makes Neapolitan-style thin-crust pizzas. The pizzeria strives for quality, variety and imagination with 16 pies at an appealing price point. Pizzas here are between $19 and $25, while some premium pizza competitors can ask in the high $20s or more than $30 for their wares.

We tried four Pizza Nerd pies. Three were winners that prompted disagreements about our favourites. I voted for the Maclaren (prosciutto, apple, goat cheese and spicy honey), but the Lisgar (house-made sausage with local cheese, basil puree and tomato sauce) and Lyon (black-pepper-molasses bacon, local cheese, pickled red onion and chili-basil honey) were close runners-up.

But we were unanimous that the Bank pizza (marinated portabello mushrooms, cracked black pepper, cheese, parmesan and truffle oil) underwhelmed. It should have been more mushroom-y, or more umami-packed, and maybe even more luscious texturally.

None of these pizzerias supplanted my big three (Heartbreakers Pizza, Farinella and Retro Gusto), although proximity also counts in their favour. Maybe our favourite pizzerias are the best closest to where we live. That said, the exception proving that rule is Roberto Pizza Romana in Chelsea, which I think is magnificent.

Have I still failed to cover your pizzeria of choice? Let me know via a comment or email.

phum@postmedia.com

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