What is there to say. Great day with Mother Dear at Mill Creek Park, which is just budding, and a trip to Uptown. The service remains devil may care, strewn with “ball-busting” and words of a profane bent being bandied about here and there. The same service drops off free unordered cheesy garlic bread and takes a personal interest in our visit and family. If you are put off by well-meaning people using unfriendly words, this is too complicated a place for you.
 

The fresh salad comes with an excellent peppered parmesan dressing. The Italian wedding soup, regardless of how it’s made, is intensely chickened in it’s broth, and precisely balanced by bitter greens, enriched by pearls of pasta and tiny/fatty meatballs, and a few shakes of parm thicken and bind it into some kind of delicious that is hard to find.

The pizza foundation is a tasty and lightly oiled crust supporting a sharp but lightly sweet sauce, intensely flavored toppings, all topped with a thick layer of cheese baked to the point of dark brown, crispy bubbles. This is pizza! Steph added a couple of soft and delicious meatballs with a splash of sauce, which was eagerly scooped with the garlic bread. This simple and unapologetic place puts fancy and dancy to shame on a regular basis. If you get a chance...go, just leave a table open for us.
 

Right on Belmont Avenue, Uptown Pizza looks like almost everything else on Belmont Avenue which does not scream out appetizing. A dingy little stand alone building, the impression doesn’t improve upon stepping inside. Not unclean or unsanitary, but nothing  sparkles. Don’t let that deter you. It is the grunge of thousands upon thousands of meals being placed in front of happy people. Why are they happy?

All well and good, but here is the magic of Uptown. It all happens before the pizza even arrives. Stick to the small pizza because if you are skipping soup and salad you are enjoying but not quite getting it. The salad is the only one I am familiar with that rivals Luigi’s in Akron for pizza house salad. This is not some extravagant mixture of greens with exotic dressings and toppings, it is instead an always bright and crisp mound of iceberg lettuce beets, garbanzo beans etc. and if you order the cheese look out. Our family favorite choice is the peppered parmesan for dressing.