During the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show held recently in Las Vegas, we rented a large 9 bedroom "villa" to house the sales team who worked the event. We had been working at The Venetian all day setting up the suites where we showed our gear and we were pretty tired when we got back out to the house. Instead of making something or going out, we decided upon getting some pizza delivered to us. We found a place not far from the house by the name of Pellegrini Pizza that delivered and the pizzas were so good - and unique - that I wanted to tell you about them.
Pellegrini Pizza is a relatively new restaurant, opened in 2013. Their specialties are thin crust pizza and chicken wings, but they also serve pasta dishes, sandwiches and subs, burgers, soups, salads and a wide variety of appetizers. Although we didn't go to the restaurant, it is located in northwest Las Vegas in a strip mall back off of Rainbow, just south of the Highway 95 freeway where it meets up with Summerlin Parkway. (see map)
On our first full day in Las Vegas for CES we set up our displays in a handful of suites in The Venetian. It was getting to be close to 6 p.m. and we'd pretty much finished up with what needed to be done and our boss suggested that half of us take off and figure out what to do for pizzas that night and the rest of our group of 10 would follow along shortly. On the way to the house, my colleague Matt was looking up pizza places in northwest Las Vegas and whether or not they delivered. He came up with three different places and when we got back to the house, we got on my lap top and took a closer look at these places on Urbanspoon and Yelp. Overwhelmingly, the on-line users of those web sites gave Pellegrini Pizza the most glowing reviews of them all.
We looked up Pellegrini Pizza on-line and found their menu page. We found that they didn't just have the regular "small, medium, large" sizes of pizza - they had SIX different sizes ranging from 10" all the way up to a 30" pizza! Well, we wanted to see a 30" pizza! And this was our first mistake. Our second mistake is that we ordered FOUR of them! For 10 guys! The third mistake was when Matt called in the order, he was told that it would take over an hour to make the four pizzas, then another 15 minutes to deliver them. If I would have known that it was going to take that long, I would have put the kibosh on that many 30" pizzas and gone with smaller ones. But the order was in and we had to wait for 90 minutes before the pizza driver called us and said he was just outside the gates (it was a gated community that we stayed in) with the pizzas.
The rest of our group had shown up about a half hour earlier expecting pizzas to be there when they go back to the house, but when we told them that we'd ordered 30" pizzas the novelty soothed any rumbling stomachs that some of us had. When the pizzas showed up, four of us went out to meet the pizza guy at the gate. He came out with these huges boxes and we took them into the house. Exclamations and hollering ensued when we laid them on the counter.
The four pizzas we got were my standard favorite of Italian sausage, pepperoni and mushroom. That proved to be the most popular pizza of the four we got. As you can see with the picture at right, the pizza was gargantuan. I put the bottle of the Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale in the corner of the box to show the size scale of the pizza.
Usually, novelty sized pizzas aren't very good. There's an unevenness of temperature causing some parts of the pizza dough to be more cooked than others. But with the Pellegrini pizza, I didn't get that at all. The slices were cut into the tavern style square pieces that I like so well. The crust was understandably more limp than what you'd probably get on a non-delivered pizza, but the overall taste was wonderful. The toppings were plentiful, the cheese had a great mozzarella flavor to it, and the sauce was tangy and sweet. The pizza easily passed my "Does it taste good with a beer?" test. I stayed away from the thicker outer crust pieces and went more for the "honey pot" squares in the middle.
And we had a lot of pizza to go with a lot of beer in the house. The three other pizzas included on that was half mozzarella cheese and half pepperoni, a "supreme" pizza that featured pepperoni, black olives, green peppers, mushrooms and onions, and the "Pilgrim" that was more of a "meat lovers" pizza topped with pepperoni, sausage, ham and meatballs. That pizza is the one on the left in the picture at left, the "supreme" is the one on the right.
The sausage, pepperoni and mushroom went first, followed by a large portion of the "Pilgrim" pizza. The saltiness of the all meat pizza was very pronounced making for a great flavor with beer. But when it was all said and done, there was still a large amount of the half-sausage and half-cheese left in the box. (No one had a slice of the cheese-only side of the pizza.) And the supreme was well over half-way from being finished. We started to combine pizza pieces in the boxes and we had just under two full pizzas remaining. And we were stuffed.
Then it hit us - where in the world were we going to store what basically amounted to two 30" pizzas? The large refrigerator was already stocked full of items for breakfast and for a couple of upcoming dinners were having. Even if we put the pieces in Ziploc bags, we still wouldn't have been able to find much room in the fridge for the leftovers. And, besides, when would we have time to eat the leftover pizza with all the other food that we had in the house? It was cool in the garage at night - about 40 degrees - so we just put them out there. The next morning I took a look at the pizzas and made the executive decision to throw 'em away. The cheese, grease and toppings had all coagulated and they weren't worth keeping.
And it was a shame because I'll bet the Pellegrini Pizza pies would have been great warmed up for a snack at some point. They were very good on their own - even with the sogginess that happens with delivery. Even though they took a little too long to make then deliver, the 30" pizzas worked out great - not only because of the taste and quality of the pizzas, but because of the "Holy Shit!" factor when we first saw the size of the pizzas. If we're back at this house again next year for the 2016 CES, we'd have no problem calling up Pellegrini Pizza to have them deliver us more pizzas. Although it probably won't be four 30" pizzas next time.
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