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Given that it only takes a few minutes to cook a pizza with the right equipment, it's odd that burgers, burritos and the like have a stranglehold on fast food. Sure, there was the short-lived McDonald's McPizza—the less said about that, the better. And there's Little Caesars' Hot-N-Ready—not to be confused with Haute 'n' Ready, my new fast-food column. Some Subways have tried pizza, mostly without success.
MOD strives for a more upscale ambience, with long, distressed wood tables and a playlist of pre-Reagan pop and punk. The open kitchen lets you watch chefs, who were seemingly ordered from a barista catalog, turn your order into a finished product while you sip a craft beer—regrettably served in a 12-ounce plastic cup—or one of MOD's housemade juices.
Your pie is assembled on a line, Chipotle-style, then tossed into a Neapolitan-hot 800-degree oven. Three minutes later, you have a thin, crispy crust covered with sauce hot enough to scald your tongue. Best, the toppings bake into the melting cheese—an improvement over made-to-order pizza by the slice, with its toppings haphazardly tossed on an already-cooked slice of cheese.
The base pizzas are all solid, from the spicy, Buffalo wing-inspired Calexico, to the sausage-and-mushroom Jasper, to the all-the-meats Mad Dog. You can also create your own for the same price, just north of $7 for a personal-sized pie.
Is there better pizza in the city? Of course. Think of MOD Pizza as the Qdoba to Pizza Hut's Taco Bell. It's not remotely close to the best, but it is better than the bottom of the fast-food barrel. And that's not too bad for a chain.
WWeek 2015