Artichoke

The day after we went to Maison, we used another one of our vouchers at Artichoke Basille's Pizza in Chelsea, hoping that it would redeem a mediocre food weekend.

Our voucher covered an 18" pizza and 2 beers for about $23 (before tax/tip).  Considering that most pizzas at Artichoke are $28-30, we thought this would be a pretty good deal.

For beers, A chose the Artichoke house brew and M got a bottle of Heineken. The Artichoke house beer was a little sweet. Almost oddly sweet. Even though a lot of people classified it as being a light beer, it was full of flavor and body.

Although we had heard great things about the Sicilian pizzas, especially the Vodka Sicilian, we thought that for our first trip we should go with the namesake artichoke pizza.  Although there were mixed reviews online about the artichoke pizza, we like artichokes and we like artichoke dip (what some people compared it to), so we decided to try it.  The pizza was described on the menu as a pizza with artichoke hearts, spinach, cream sauce, mozzarella and pecorino romano cheese.

The pizzas at Artichoke are gigantic.  As you can see from the photo below with A's hand in it, they're huge and 2 people can definitely not finish one pizza in one sitting unless they are starving and overstuff themselves.  In fact, A's initial response to this monstrosity being put down in front of him was, "Good lord!"

But while the artichoke pizza was huge, it wasn't great.  The creamy sauce only covered the first 1/3 to 1/2 of each slice. While that added moisture to the pie itself, it was very heavy. The lack of sauce on the rest of the slice made it very dry, though. It was sort of a damned either way type of situation.  There was no discernible spinach. It was incredibly doughy. For a pizza called an "artichoke pizza" there were barely any artichokes. The cheese didn't cover the full pizza (not even close). For all the criticisms online of it being too oily and greasy, it was the opposite for us - dry and so, so doughy.

Overall this was a fairly disappointing meal. Parts of this signature pie were very flavorful but extremely heavy and the others were very dry and doughy.  (When we made our leftovers at home, we added garlic powder and Italian seasoning, which improved it somewhat but couldn't fix the overwhelming feeling of being weighed down by dough.) Will we come back to Artichoke? Maybe, maybe not. If we do, though, we know what we won't get.  In the end, this weekend ended up being less than satisfying for dinners, but at least we used our vouchers and got them out of the way.