As far as theme park food goes, Universal Studios in Orlando, makes good pizza. Most theme park pizza consists of overpriced personal sized pies, that seem to be nothing more than bad frozen pizzas. At Universal Studios, there is a restaurant in the New York section of the park called Louie’s Italian Restaurant. Here, they make full sized pies rather than the personal sized pizzas. The taste of the pizza, the willingness of the employees to do special orders on the toppings, as well as the imperfections in the crust lead me to believe that the restaurant employees are actually making the pies fresh in the back instead of just heating up pre-made frozen pizzas, which is a good thing. I visited Universal last Saturday for the second night of Halloween Horror Nights, and while I was there, I had dinner at Louie’s.
On this visit, I ordered a Garden Vegetable pizza, minus the mushrooms. It was a good pizza, but I had problems with the crust and the toppings. I thought the pie could have been cooked a little bit longer to make a slightly crispier crust, although it seemed consistent with the pizza I have eaten here in the past. A generous amount of the toppings were piled onto this pizza. There was no lack of green peppers and onions, but they didn’t seem to be cooked into the pizza too well. The toppings seemed like they were piled onto the pie halfway through cooking, so not all of them stuck to the cheese. It was a minor thing, and the pizza held together for the most part except for the occasional bell pepper that decided to escape.
Something interesting did happen while I was eating the pizza though. A guy in a wheelchair rolled up and dropped a business card with an American flag pin stuck through it. My initial thought was that he was handing out church propaganda to all of us ‘pagans’ that were enjoying our Halloween event, but it was worse than that. He was begging for money. The card talked about how he was deaf and for a donation of $3, we could keep the pin to help with his expenses. I wonder if those expenses included the admission that he paid to get into the park, which would have cost somewhere between $30 to $70. As we were eating, he probably made about $50 in ten minutes before coming back the section of the restaurant where I was sitting to either collect money or his card. By the end of the night, he must have made a huge amount of money if he worked all of the restaurants in this way. Whether he was really deaf or not, no one should be subjected to being solicited for money while eating your overpriced pizza, when you pay an overpriced admission to get into a theme park.
Other than that incident, I had a good time at Halloween Horror Nights, and I enjoyed my pizza. This pizza was a good 5 out of 8 slices.
