Papa Joe's Pizza Review

It's time to meet Papa Joe. Tonight's pizza is a large three topping with bacon, pepperoni, and sun-dried tomatoes with four garlic dips from Papa Joe's Pizzeria in downtown Kitchener. It's a pretty unassuming front for a shop, but they had a 5.0 rating with 70 reviews on Uber Eats. Uber Eats, you might think, is an odd choice for me (call and order from restaurant individually, don't give in to the middle-man-market) but I was fortunate enough to have my lovely wife get me a gift card for the time that she'd be away on trip, to ensure that I was well-fed with great pizza.

The Establishment

Papa Joes storefront on Victoria

The outside is a little rough around the edges, the inside looks like a classic Canadian pizzeria. I was greeted very by a young lady in a tie-dye sweater. There was no fuss, no muss, she knew I was there for a pickup and handed me the pizza and the dips immediately. I was a little suspicious as the dips were sitting on the register despite the dips apparently living in the fridge next to it. In any case, I'm going to eat them and see how I feel. I'm sure that they were just taken out seconds before I got there.

Dip Situation

Similar to Figaro's, we have creamy garlic dips that are portioned out into small containers, but interestingly they also had prepackaged factory dips, the kind that you might see at a Sobeys. So I think these must be a house Creamy Caesar sauce. As I've said, usually the homemade Creamy Caesar is good, or it's bad, it's never in between. I had a leftover slice of Figaro's pizza with a Gino's dip for lunch, so I have the Gino's dip fresh in my mind for comparison.

Initial Impressions

My initial impressions of Big Papa is he's got a real thin crust. Maybe I should have figured that out from the box saying the best thin crust in Kitchener Waterloo. But it's pretty thin, and as far as thin crust goes, not my favorite. It's a bit tough. The taste is pretty standard fast food pizza, not incredible.

Top down of the pie

The sun-dried tomatoes are very flavorful, better than Figaro's. The pepperoni is nice and crisp and thinly sliced, no more big floppy guys. The bacon is genuine crumble and is basically exactly what you'd expect, pretty good. The cook overall slightly veers towards overdone, but that might be because of the thin crust. The dip is cold, so clearly it was just in the fridge.

Close up of a slice

Final Assessment

Overall I'd say it's fine. The dip has the sticky quality that some garlic sauces have instead of being fresh and creamy like Figaro's. Despite coming out in packaging that makes it look homemade, I wouldn't be surprised if this was store-bought sauce, kind of just tastes like what you would get if you peeled the foil lid off of a creamy garlic from Sobeys.

Overall Papa Joe makes a fine pie. It was a bit cold when I got it home, but I'm not going to put that on them as I think I was late getting there. Everything was a minimum of what I would expect, but definitely nothing wowed me. If I had to choose between this and Gino's I'd probably take Gino's. I think Gino's might be more flavorful, and I prefer the thicker crust.

Honestly going to give these guys a six and a half stars because it's hard to score below that. I mean pizza is pizza, so it's pretty good even though it's not too good.