Pizza from a truck, it used to be a novelty when Del Popolo hit the streets with a wood-fired oven that was mobile and served up hot pizzas to the masses. Since then several other trucks have come on the scene so it's not such a rare occurrence to come across one at Off The Grid or in this case at SOMA StrEatFood Park. This time around it's Firetrail Pizza truck, which isn't so much a truck as a trailer with a semi-permanent spot here.
I'd been to the park a few times before but seem to always come when it either wasn't open or out on loan. Eventually, since I go there so often, I was able to try them on two different occasions. They only have a handful of choices on the chalkboard menu and after a brief thought I decided to just go traditional and get a sausage pizza for $12 and so I could feel slightly less guilty I paid an extra $2 to throw some mixed greens on top of it.
It's a large single serve pizza with tomato sauce, sausage, mozzarella and mixed greens lightly dressed with olive oil. Since things are cooked to order you get a hot, fresh pizza with crisp, crunchy dough--and as far as pizzas go it's pretty decent. The sauce was sweet and garlicy--the sausage was standard Italian, though I kind of wanted a more cheese than the sprinkle on it. I liked the addition of the greens and olive oil as it gave it additional flavor and crunch--which it kind of needed. Overall a standard if not spectacular pizza that didn't leave much of an impression when I finished. Next time around I hit up the place with a friend so I let her choose which pizza to try and she, sadly, just wanted the most basic of pizzas--the margherita.
I would say I don't have anything against the margherita pizza but I do--it's just tomato sauce (same from above), a plop or two of mozzarella and usually some basil either in the form of leaves or in this case chopped--kind of like the boring brother of pizza choices. It's easy to make with low overhead costs and most people will get this as an appetizer share in addition to a glass or two of wine which is the real up-sell. As these things go, again it was a perfectly ok pie, but again, I wish there was more cheese and more flavor. It was hot and crispy out of the oven though near the points it did get a little soggy from the sauce. Something that many pizzas suffer from and being this wasn't the most exciting of pizzas to begin with there wasn't a lot of additional flavor to make up for it. My friend was like, "it's okay" which pretty much sums up both pizzas.
Now since these were wood-fired one thing to keep in mind is the char that you get on the bottom of them. Here are pictures of the bottom of the each of the ones I tried.
The one on the right had what I'd call a light crust, lightly brown with not much of the black char. The next one was darker with more char along the bottom and on the crust. Some folks like dark char, it gives the crust a slightly burnt smoky flavor. For me I'm a light crust person and when I go to a place with wood burning ovens I ask for light crust so keep that in mind if you check them out as each cook will probably do it differently.
I'm not going to out and out recommend Firetrail Pizza but I'm also not going to say don't eat them either. I mean it's pizza and most places fall somewhere between okay-ish and wow that was really good. Here, they are decent enough if you can't find any other choices at the food park, I know that sounds like a knock and it kind of is, but hey, peoples opinions of pizza vary as wildly as they do about burgers--for me eh--for you--who knows.
