Master Pizza
 Medina, Ohio        Date of Visit  10/14/15        http://www.masterpizza.com 

For a birthday treat, we were taken to a “new” pizza joint in Medina. They are new to Medina but Master Pizza has been slinging slices and pies in Cleveland since 1955. Over the past few years they have been stacking up international awards and have opened a local outlet. The place is really well put together and clean, both aesthetically and maintenancely(?).

We were one of the few served (most boxes were headed out the door to be consumed elsewhere and they deliver) by a friendly young lady who really went above and beyond compared to almost any pizza place I can remember. You might be missing out if you are carrying out.

The menu had a lot of things I was quickly curious about having checked it out online. Initially, our order started with one each of their blue ribbon offerings under the classic specialty part of the menu. About a minute later we added a side salad and breadsticks.

We split the salad of iceberg/romaine, pepperoni, carrots, purple cabbage, prov/mozz between the four of us, but really ordered it because it comes with their house Italian dressing which apparently is popular enough to bottle and sell separately. The salad was fine, the dressing better, but for me it wouldn’t compete with others like that on the monkey salad at Chad Anthony’s Italian Grille (formerly Antone’s). Master’s dressing is a pale yellow and shows no visible evidence of the flavorings infused into the oil and vinegar. Good, but just good. The breadsticks are made from fresh dough, brushed with garlic sauce and topped with cheese. In all honesty, I found this better than the three pizzas, great balance of everything you wanted, yeasty dough, buttery garlic, stringy cheese, simply good. The pizzas were less balanced and not as flavorful.
 

My least favorite pizza was the one I was looking the most forward to, the Popeye with garlic white sauce, fresh spinach, tomato, and artichoke hearts. The crust was as good as the breadsticks but the garlic was difficult to detect, as were the spinach and chokes. A sprinkle of salty parm helped bring some flavors out but not enough to warrant a reorder.
 

The Three Little Pigs is built on a red sauce and topped with Cup’N Char honey ham, bacon & hand-pinched sausage. The ham was good, the sausage was good, the bacon good…but all together, they seemed to get lost. Perfectly good pizza but not something I’d expect to win substantial awards.
 

I think we all favored the more straightforward Pepperoni Passion with two different kinds of pep and topped with parm. One of the two meat coins is a Cup’N Char spicy pepperoni, which had a more aggressive pepper than most and really stood out compared to the others. On our first trip to Master Pizza we found a nice place, with nice people and pizza somewhere between ordinary and extraordinary.