After a recommendation from my daughter, I decided to select a new establishment on the Delmar Loop for lunch today, Doughocracy. The idea sounded great, a subway-like setup where you select the sauce, cheeses, meats and vegetables on your pizza, and then it goes through a conveyor belt oven to produce a fresh custom pizza in minutes. The restaurant is located on the southeast corner of Delmar and Westgate, just east of Blueberry Hill in a storefront that was formerly the Ziezo women's clothing boutique.
We were happy to see that the Loop Trolley construction is now complete on the western end of the Loop, and we were able to park on Delmar and navigate to the restaurant without any problems. We arrived around 11:30 am so it was still empty which gave us plenty of time to make our selections. My mother-in-law selected a plain cheese pizza, my wife selected one with sausage, I selected the Vegetarian's Nightmare specialty pizza and my son custom designed his own pizza.
There was only one person who was constructing our pizzas and the process took a lot longer than expected, even for the simple cheese pizza and the one topping sausage order. I was able to customize my Vegetarian;s Nightmare by adding meatballs, hot peppers and black onions, and my son created his custom toppings of bacon, chicken, provolone, gorgonzola and hot peppers. We did notice that after all the toppings were added, our pizza constructor added a generous quantity of olive oil on top. Then they placed the pizzas on the belt to be slowly sent through their oven. We also ordered drinks and while we were getting them the first two pizzas emerged. They had one of those fancy fountain drink machines (the Pepsi version) where you can mix whatever you want together, but all I wanted was water!
The dining area was not too large, but since the place was empty we selected a nice table on the side. They played a mix of trendy alternative/pop music while we tested out our pizzas. They were served on large flat trays without plates and there were plastic utensils available by the drinks and plenty of napkins.
My Vegetarian's Nightmare looked very enticing and smelled great.
Soon all the pizzas were ready and we were able to dig in to eat. We immediately noticed that the slices did not separate too easily and they could also not be picked up by hand without making a mess. The crust was much too thin in the middle and rather soft and mushy there without much body. I ended up eating the middle of my slices with fork and knife, while being able to pick it up with my hands after eating about half of each slice. The toppings were pretty good, the cheese was okay and the sauce was sparse and bland. But the biggest disappointment at a restaurant called "Doughocracy" was finding a crust that was thin, flimsy, doughy and flavorless. I can imagine that Paul Hollywood of the Great British Baking Show would have labelled it "underbaked". It also seemed overly greasy and we were not sure why they added all the olive oil on top.
The service was reasonably good and the employees kept coming back asking how everything was. I do like the concept and wanted to love the pizza there, but it did not taste as good as it looked and it sat like a rock in my stomach after I ate it. Even my son the college student who had not eaten breakfast did not finish his pizza. He said he preferred the SLU Griesedieck cafeteria pizza which at least has better crust. Being in the Loop with Pi and Racanelli's just down the street (and La Pizza and Dewey's not too far away either) and pizza available places like Cicero's, I am not sure how long Doughocracy can last unless they improve their crust recipe or baking process to make a better pie. I love visiting new restaurants, and I was looking forward to trying Doughocracy, but I will have to say I was quite disappointed in the food there. Hopefully they were just having a bad day or there was a problem with our specific batch of pizza dough, since I was not impressed very much with their resulting pizza pies.
Food Quality
Service
Because of the underbaked dough and the large amount of grease, we spent the rest of the day and evening trying to digest that unpleasant pizza. I love pizza and normally I would like to eat another slice even after I know that I am full, but I wanted to stop eating this pizza even while I was still hungry. It was perhaps the worst pizza I have ever eaten.
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