Metro Pulse/Restaruant Rover/The Pizza Kitchen

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The Pizza Kitchen
9411 S. Northshore Drive
531-1422

by Ally Carte

While Proust has his madeleines, I have my pizza pies.

Picture a big, Northeastern, rust belt kind of city. In one of that big city's many somewhat smaller neighborhoods, there was a pizza place called DiPietrios, which was tucked on a side street just across from a seedy little park. In this park, there was a swing set that maybe had two complete swings and two hanging lengths of chain link, where a seat used to be. Picture as well a gang—not like a street gang sort of gang, just a bunch of teenagers. The girls have bad dye jobs with brown or black roots; the boys wear jean jackets. They've just come out of the double glass doors of DiPietrios. More than one of them is smoking cigarettes.

Don't imagine West Side Story. Think late '80s—Flock of Seagulls and Heart and Duran Duran and (shudder) Poison. Hanging out in a seedy park in front of a hole-in-the-wall pizza place, owned by the dad of a very odd kid, Sal Jr., who we all went to school with. DiPietrios itself was at best nondescript—vinyl booths, Formica tables, low lighting.

Sal Sr. was a genius, once the perspective of hindsight gets factored in. Few of the elementary schools had kitchens, which meant the tedium of packed lunches for students and staff. Once a week, each school would have pizza day, where for a buck you could get two slices of DiPietrios and an orange drink. A welcome chance of pace from mushy PB&J and raisins, and a brilliant way to build a client base. By high school, DiPietrios was the only pie you'd spend your baby-sitting/grocery bagging money on.

In college and thereafter, DiPietrios was the pizza I craved. Its yeasty crust. Its smooth, tomato-y sauce. Its salty cheese blend. When I got back to the city I grew up in, I made a mad dash for this haven. And Thomas Wolfe was right. The food wasn't bad, really, but what was missing were the friends and the nights and, well, being a teenager, I guess. The park, however, was still seedy.

I've told you all of that to tell you this: The Pizza Kitchen is a DiPietrios to a bunch of someone elses—more than a simple restaurant, more like an icon or a touchstone or a symbol of place, of freedom, of youth. When we hit the PK on a Friday night, there they were—wall-to-wall teenagers, dressed in Abercrombie and Fitch, primped to suburban perfection. The girls had a fresh-scrubbed appeal; the boys could have been straight from the golf course. No one was smoking. The only folks in the yellow-painted cinder block place my age and older had their own offspring in tow, inculcating them in the ways of this fairly new, way-West Knoxville hangout.

Nominally, this is a restaurant review column—but the Pizza Kitchen isn't just a restaurant to its regulars, which is good because the food itself is pretty average and somewhat overpriced. The lunch buffet ($7), served Monday-Friday from noon until 2 p.m., was a bit of a let-down. While the green leaf lettuce salad, its accompanying tangy balsamic vinaigrette, and the tender rosemary rolls were a great kick-off, the gummy rigatoni in tomato sauce had spent a bit too much time in the warmer. The pizza itself, however, was good, with an herb-dusted crust that was just thick and crispy enough to support a variety of toppings—my favorite being the barbecue chicken and red onion offering.

The skeleton lunch staff seemed to have much better things to do than keeping the buffet stocked. Three of the four stainless steel pizza pans were emptied shortly after we arrived. Hungry diners lay in wait for slow-to-come pizzas to fill these spots and would pounce whenever a new one was placed under the heat lamps. For a less hefty cost—say even $5—the buffet would be worth the inconvenience.

The menu itself provides plenty of offerings for almost any eater. The timid could stick to a straightforward pizza, with their own selection of topping—$8 for a medium cheese, with toppings ($1-$1.50) ranging from the standard pepperoni to the more exotic artichoke hearts and goat cheese. The meat lover can dive into a meatball sub ($7), a baguette stuffed with tough meatballs and tomato sauce, topped with melted mozzarella. While the side of fresh red grapes helped cut the richness of the sub, the pasta salad that also graced the plate was somewhat dry, gritty and strangely spiced. The veggie calzone ($8.50) was okay, full of black beans, spinach, ricotta cheese and tomato sauce, baked to bubbling in the pizza oven. Also offered are specialty items, like a blackened chicken fettuccine Alfredo ($13.95), muffalettas ($8), and pastas like an angel hair dish ($9.95) that mixes fresh basil and sun-dried tomatoes with a lemon and white wine sauce.

I'd imagine that anyone who ate at DiPietrios would leave with the same sort of underwhelmed, out-of-place feeling that we did when we walked out of the Pizza Kitchen. There's more attached to the PK experience than adequate food, and it might be unfair to simply judge it on that. Memories, maybe, are being made under the twinkling PK disco ball, which will someday provide fodder for another scribe's column.