The Pizza Press

We’ve tried well over a dozen different styles of pizza over the years, including multiple Italian recipes, regional versions from across the United States, and international variations sold elsewhere in Europe and Asia. Our love to like to dislike ratio is probably 1:3:1 or higher, and we’re open-minded to the possibility of improvement, so it’s rare for us to have pizza that makes us say “never again.”

One such “dislike” example is The Pizza Press, a nearly 20-store chain with eight Orange County locations, which struck us as a less impressive, smaller-scale version of Mod Pizza. You can order one of seven pizzas named for some reason after old newspapers, or “publish your own” pizza with your choice of ingredients. We weren’t sure what was worse: the barely mediocre thin crust pizzas, which didn’t taste much more appetizing than the cardboard boxes they were served in, or the indifferent service, which registered a zero or one on the ten-point scale of caring about taking and assembling our orders. There’s nothing quite like receiving a pizza that you can see was put together as plainly as humanly possible.

Combined with the waits – one to place an order at a counter, then another for pizzas to be ready – there was nothing good about our experience. We later returned with (very hungry) friends, who agreed that it was “just something to eat” rather than good in any way. That’s too low a threshold for us, and we don’t plan to revisit.