One of our favorite pizza places in the Quad Cities - Hall of Fame Pizza - closed last year and we've been hard-pressed to find a replacement for it in the very small rotation of pizza places we like to visit in the area. (Quad City-style pizza is just plain nasty tasting to me and my wife who didn't grow up in the area, but the people who grew up with it still love it.) There was a pizza place that had opened some time ago on W. Kimberly in Davenport and we've been reluctant to give it a try. Well, mainly because we hadn't heard much about the place. One Friday evening this past fall, we decided to head over and give Millz Pizza and Grill a try. (see map)
Joe Hines is the young guy who started Millz Pizza and Grill in August of 2016. We were trying to figure out what the building used to be that Millz is in. My wife thought it was an old Kentucky Fried Chicken, I thought it was an old Pizza Hut. It may have been both at some point in time. One of the first things Hines did after Millz opened was to offer an eating challenge - order a 28" single-topping pizza and you have 30 minutes to eat the whole thing. If you beat the challenge, you get a $50 gift certificate from the restaurant, the pizza will be free, and your picture will go up on a wall. If you can't do the challenge, you'll have to pay the full price of the pizza - $36.99. I didn't notice any pictures on the wall when we were there.
Millz used to open at 7 a.m. for breakfast, but I see that they now open at 10 a.m. seven days a week. They're usually open until 10 p.m. through the week, but are open late on Friday and Saturday nights until 2 a.m. when they have live music available.
It was around 6:30 when we walked into Millz and found a table in the dining area near a corner. They had a bar in the place and a pool table in the back. A number of flat screen televisions were hung on the wall, most showing sporting events. I would say there were about 16 or 17 people in the place, so it wasn't packed at all.
They had their music system cranked incredibly loud when we first got in. I love AC/DC like the next guy, but not when it's hitting about 110 decibels with two Bose commercial speakers pointed at us. Our waitress for the evening came over to greet us and drop off menus. Quite honestly, I couldn't hear a word she was saying because the music was so loud. She had to come up close to me to ask me what I wanted to drink, I couldn't hear her above the music. I told her to come back once the music was turned down. We seriously considered leaving because it was so loud - as in dance club loud - before someone got smart and turned down their sound system.
Our server came back and asked again what we would like to drink. I asked what they had and she tried to go through the beer list from memory and by looking at the taps behind the bar. She then apologized and said, "This is my second day on the job and I'm still trying to sort things out." I turned to look at what they had on tap and I immediately could see the distinctive tap handle of Kona Brewing Co. Big Wave. Since it's my favorite beer, I had to have one of those. My wife saw that they had the Lagunitas IPA and she got that.
The girl asked me if I wanted a small one or a pint. I told her I would take the pint. She brought me back a 23 ounce glass with the Big Wave - which is what I would have ordered in the first place had she known the difference between 16 ounces - a pint - and 23 ounces. She was having troubles on her second day.
We ordered up a 16" thin crust/New York-style pizza with our standard Italian sausage, pepperoni and mushroom. The mushrooms were canned and my wife - who wouldn't even consider eating mushrooms up to 10 years ago until she started having fresh mushrooms on pizza and in foods - didn't care for them. She picked off the mushrooms from the two or three triangles of pizza she had.
The pizza crust was light and crispy, but held up very well with the plentiful toppings. The pepperoni was salty with a hint of spiciness, and the Italian sausage had a great fennel taste with a slight spicy bite.
The cheese they used on their pizza, well, we weren't overly certain we cared for it. It appeared to be a combination of cheddar and provolone that didn't really seem to work well together. The cheese had the creamy nature of provolone, but the cheddar was sort of coagulating as it cooled down. The caramelization on top of the cheese gave it a good flavor, but we just weren't that whippy on the taste combination. Still, the pizza tasted good with a beer.
The pizza at Millz Pizza was - in my estimation - just above average. I would have like to have tried a Millz pizza with straight mozzarella cheese and see how it stacked up versus the very good pizza that we're missing at Hall of Fame. The atmosphere at Millz Pizza was more of a sports bar and once they figured out the music was extremely too loud and turned it down, it was a more enjoyable place to hang. And we cut some slack with our server who had only been on the job at Millz for a couple days. We were glad that she told us she was new or we would have been questioning her serving skills. We're not quite ready to put Millz into our rotation of pizza places in the Quad Cities - as limited as they are. But it would be a nice option for those who don't care for Quad City-style pizza.
(Update - Not long after this entry was published, Millz Pizza announced that they would be shutting down on January 23. We never did make it back there, and while it's sad a restaurant with a young owner closed down, we just didn't care for the mixed cheese on the pizza.)
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