Cheap Eats: Pizza Plus #1

A customer, so stoked about pizza pie. (Credit: Andi Berlin/Special to Metromix)

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What we ordered: Two all-you-can-eat pizza buffets with salad and drinks ($6.99 each, with 10 percent discounts for UA students) for a total of $12.58, way under our Cheap Eats goal of $20 for two people.

Comments: It may seem like a regular pizza place, but Pizza Plus #1 is actually the embodiment of high mathematic principles such as chaos theory, where an endless array of factors contribute to making the outcome generally unknown. Its name, for example, is mystifying and perhaps inexplicable. Is it a blip in the English language, or some kind of code? Perhaps this really is the number one, the pinnacle of the pizza mountain, or at least the first of a franchise. Or maybe it’s meant to be used in a sentence, “I’ll have a pizza, plus number one, please.”

Food: The limitless possibilities carry over to the all-you-can-eat buffet, where a wide variety of inedibles co-exist with reasonably flavored pies, creating a spectrum of dinner options. Take the salad bar, for example. It seems practically impossible to get out of there with any kind of success, but it can be done. The iceberg lettuce is soggy and the tomatoes look like baby food, but the heads of raw broccoli are somewhat appealing, and taste decent with a side of ranch!

The signs advertise unlimited soup, salad and pasta with the buffet, but on our visit the only pasta we could find were two gummy macaroni and pasta salads that for some reason contained cucumbers.

As for the soups, they can be categorized succinctly: The chicken enchilada tasted like buffalo sauce, the broccoli cheese was all cream, the chicken noodle looked canned and the chili looked like chicken noodle. (It actually was! I guess they had forgotten to change the label.)

The pizza itself—the focal point here—was pretty decent. It may not taste good when it’s been sitting out for a while, but on our stay the employee made up two new pizzas just for us. (He was a really nice guy.) The first had mushrooms, onion slices, black olives and slices of crisp pepperoni. It tasted almost like Pizza Hut, but with a less doughy crust and lots of healthy cheese. After a couple pieces of that, he asked us what we wanted next, so we suggested their specialty, the boneless buffalo chicken pizza.

What followed was sort of a hybrid between pizza and stew. The application of the buffalo sauce was extremely liberal, to say the least, making it soggy but really tangy and flavorful. Adding to the intensity: Hidden underneath the flow of sauce was a rich layer of chicken and soft pepperoni. Later, the employee told us that he developed the recipe while throwing things around in the kitchen, but he had never actually tried it himself. He seemed proud of that fact.

Bar: They’ve just been approved for a liquor license, so they’ll start selling beer in mid-August.

Bottom line: It’s practically impossible to tell if you’ll like Pizza Plus #1. As most buffets go, the experience can vary drastically depending on a variety of factors: the presence of pasta, whether that guy’s there, if they replaced the toilet paper in the bathroom, etc. If you’re not a gambler though, why not just order a pizza to-go and share with a friend? Or, since they’ll be open until 3:30 a.m. (once school starts), go when you’re drunk!