January 2020
This is a contentious one. Buffalo Chicken pizza from a pizza place in Penn Station. That's not necessarily a recipe for success.
Seriously, if you were going to cook up something called "sucess", you wouldn't start with a railroad station restaurant. You'd probably start with flour. Or mozzarella. You know, traditional pizza ingredients, not a subterranean cave of despair.
One reason is that the pizza was sitting out for a while. You could tell it was reheated – the chicken was tough. Not like "leather jacket and a switchblade" tough. Tough like eating a leather jacket. Tough like The Fonz riding a motorcycle indoors so censors would let him wear a leather jacket. Point being: the chicken was chewy. Maybe it's because it was cooked three times: first the breaded chicken was cooked, then on the pizza in the pizza oven, and finally cooked again to reheat the slice. Maybe it's just sitting out forever under a heat lamp.
The ranch was actually pretty good! I was completely surprised here – ranch is obviously inferior to blue cheese. But here, the ranch might've been the best thing on it. That's not a good sign.
The pizza looks spicy, with a buffalo sauce drizzled all over the slice. But again, sitting out might've changed the sauce! It was only spicy when I stuck my tongue in it directly. It wasn't spicy enough to notice as part of the overall experience.
Overall lesson: if you find yourself in Penn Station and want something spicy, just lick the third rail.
4/10.