Parlour Deep Dish pizza is pretty deep… we guess
Parlour Deep Dish Pizza effectively patches up the hole in Toronto’s deep-dish pizza market. We’ve all heard tell of deep-dish pizzas way out in Mississauga, but downtown, the closest we can get to a big fat Chicago-style pie is stacking three Pizza Pizza slabs on top of each other, pouring blue cheese dressing over it, and eating it with a knife and fork.
Parlour has an odd model. With no physical restaurant or take-out location, they identify themselves as “a virtual restaurant with REAL food.” (It’s not like they e-mail you a .jpeg of a pizza or something.) Instead, they offer just three pies—classic (mozzarella, sausage, tomato), chicken (smoked chicken, spinach, goat cheese), and vegetarian (ratatouille and roasted mushrooms), no substitutions or special requests—with all orders vetted through OrderIt.ca. The pizzas clock in at $25, which is a bit much even given that one could easily feed two hungry men. They also charge an absurd $3 for cans of pop, and they include a $6.95 delivery charge and a $4 tip. So, all told, for a pie and two cans of pop, you’re looking at $46.88. Too much.
We get that Parlour is trying to retain some air of secrecy and exclusivity by charging too much for their food and having it half-covertly sent to your house like they’re pot dealers. (They kind of blew this when they opened, after the owner gave away his would-be secret identity on Facebook.) And we wouldn’t mind so much if the exorbitant cost and overages fees were reflected in the food. Looking at Parlour’s four-to-five-centimetre-thick block of pizza, we felt a bit like Homer Simpson when he ordered one of those big beers he kept hearing about in Australia. You know, “It’s pretty deep… I guess.”
It’s tasty, though, for sure. Parlour goes pretty light on the cheese, which would be criminal on a more conventional, shallow pizza, but here it just brings out the flavour in the sausage and tomato. The sausage is especially good: It’s real-deal, ground sausage meat, not those prefab rectangular blocks you get at Domino’s. The mozzarella is pretty light and inoffensive too, as mozzarella should be. More than anything, Parlour’s pies taste fresh, like they’re made from real ingredients.
Given that Toronto’s pizza landscape is split between different tiers of delivery (from Pizza Pizza all the way to Vinny Massimo’s and Valley’s Top Notch) and the sit-down, knife-and-fork pizza napoletana stuff of Libretto, Queen Margherita, et al, Parlour definitely feels like a third way. The pizza’s delicious, even if it could be deeper. But it is not $25 delicious. (Though that ultimately depends on how much you’re willing to spend on pizza.)
So we find ourselves in a bit of a double bind here. The food is good, and we’d like to see more of it, and maybe even a physical eat-in deep dish pizza restaurant. But presumably, to see all that, or even for the prices to come down, Parlour has to keep moving their thick-cut vanity pies. So with that in mind, we’d recommend it. Save your pennies and treat yourself. Just pass on the pops. And the $10 dark chocolate and caramel torte. And don’t do what we did and tip the driver five bucks on top of the built-in delivery and service charges. It’s a good thing we’ll be digesting this for the next 48 hours.
Also: We should probably note that although we’re categorizing this as a Strangelunch post, this place doesn’t deliver until 5 p.m. But if you eat lunch after 5 p.m., then we guess it still helps.
