#firesidepizza

[chefbryanwoolley-blog]

If you haven’t tried...you must! I love this BLT pizza at Fireside pizzeria in dwntn SLC! @firesidepizza #firesidepizza (at Fireside on Regent)

[cincygirlstyle]

My first visit and I was little worried because I love food and they don't serve any but you can have food delivered, and I actually like that concept... #myrtlespunchhouse #nightlife #friends #fun #food #firesidepizza #walnuthills #drinks

[treatsandbeats]

The Saddest Food Critic – Fireside Pizza

Someone once said that the truest measure of a restaurant is not its cuisine, but its décor. (I said that. Just now. Look, if you aren’t going to pay any closer attention than that, this relationship is never going to work out). And if you gaze long into a painting of a dog’s ballsack, the ballsack also gazes into you.

Fireside Pizza represents the gustatory bloom of the first northward-germinating spores of Cincinnati’s ongoing gentrification/urban renaissance (terminology dependent on where you fall in the race/wealth/guilt/passion four-dimensional manifold of social awareness and activisim. And also dependent on how much, despite your socioeconomic locus and feelings about the foregoing, you like cute little shops. I kind of like cute little shops, okay?). This restaurant is a cute little pizza place. They (the tattoos, nose rings, and beards who run the joint) installed it in the hollowed-out cadaver of Cincinnati’s oldest fire station once their business, hermit-crab like, outgrew its food truck. It’s still surrounded by vacant or barely-occupied businesses, but probably that won’t last long. Walnut Hills (the host neighborhood) is starting to happen, which is a strange verb to apply to places that (as most places do), predate anyone now living, but whatever. In the meantime, it’s still possible to find parking.

So there’s firehouse décor, right? Painted flames, as I recall, but I could be completely inventing that. (You could argue that I oughtn’t to review a restaurant where I ate over six weeks ago, but then I could argue that you ought to go fuck yourself. You and your pets. I’m not getting paid for this, so you’ll take what I give you and like it). What I’m not completely inventing, what I remember in eidetic detail, is the portrait hanging to the left of the preserved and functional roll-up doors that serve as both entrance and ambiance. The portrait was of a doggie. A Dalmatian. An unfixed Dalmatian whose junk the portraitist rendered with slavish verisimilitude. I’m not really sure whether a painting needs to be of a person in order to be a portrait, but that’s beside the point, which is that this dog’s balls haunted me throughout the meal. They haunted me.

The meal itself consisted of three wood-fired pizzas whose existence and nature were beyond my control, ordered as they were before Logan had even invited me to dinner. One of them arrived topped in a traditional pepperoni and cheese, and this one was an A plus pizza. It gets A plus because it was a pizza, and because I was ravenous when I consumed it, and because Corrie generously arranged for it to be free for me (and, I think, the rest of the guests too. People want to have dinner with sometimes. It’s conceivable). The second include artichoke hearts, maybe, and other fanciness, and that one gets something in the B range because I didn’t hate it and because, if it were leftovers, I would eat it instead of thawing out some mushroom mezzaluna ravioli Lean Cuisines, which is how I’m presently generating the empty food-boxes that I use to mark the passage of time. The final one gets a minus, but I’m not sure what letter to assign it. Something from Cyrillic or wingdings, maybe. Someone had ordered black olives on it, olives, heinous fruits to be eschewed by all right-thinking people. In their whole form, they are shiny and ovoid and black, like Dalmatian balls rendered in vegetable flesh. I braved this unspeakable pie because I am a professional, and because every so often I try things that I remember not liking (e.g. pickles, Parmesan cheese, ranch dressing) just to verify that I still don’t like them.

I still don’t like them.

Fireside Pizza is at 773 East McMillan Street. So, I presume, is the painting.