I never quite know what to make of restaurants that continuously run specials on Groupon or LivingSocial. For some wildly expensive restaurants, a $25 coupon for $12 doesn’t shave much off of their profit. For more modest eateries, I’d assume that such coupons don’t run them cheap, and so I wonder how the whole thing works out for them.
I like pizza, I like fancy pizza, and the Southside is close to my house and my work, so after seeing the Pi Coal Fired Pizza deal on heavy rotation, I decided we should give it a whirl. We went on a weeknight for an early dinner (6:30 or so). Pi is more “bar” than “restaurant,” and when I first walked in and saw the tower of Pinnacle vodka bottles and huge open floor space for mingling, I worried that I’d picked a place that is more appropriate for bros than babies.
We took a few steps in and a waitress greeted us warmly, and I felt a lot more comfortable. Because of the early hour, the place was fairly empty, so even if bringing my kid was a faux pas, it wouldn’t be witnessed by so many people. Well, it turns out, it wasn’t a faux pas at all. Kids are frequent guests (kids do love pizza after all!) and they even had little kid cups.
The menu has probably 15 different options for pizza, but I found that many of them were variations on the same theme. For example, there were probably 5 different varieties of margherita pizza. However, the ingredients on these pizzas were very high quality and the way the options are structured are well suited for people with very specific tastes. The pizza is thin crusted and fired in the pizza oven, so it is fresh and hot when it arrives at the table (and service was impressively fast).
We ordered two varieties of the “spicy cured meat” pizza. One had chorizo and the other I think had pepperoni. Since our visit was a few weeks away, the finer details have faded from my memory, but I do recall that I preferred one and Mr. Beez preferred the other, but only slightly for each. Baby Beez was kind of being a punk that night and preferred to play with the iPad instead of eating, but that was fine, it meant more for us.
After the Groupon (which I think was $10), I think we paid another $18 or so. The pizza and service were both good and the price was right. Pi worked out as an excellent option for a weeknight when we hadn’t figured out dinner, didn’t have the energy to cook, and wanted something savory and satisfying. Given that Pi so frequently offers its Groupon deals, I should pick up a couple more as an option for busy weeknights.
