Caffe' Positano NY Pizza

I ate at the new Caffe' Positano in the Super Target shopping center in Sanford, FL. The restaurant is a few stores down from the Yokohama Japanese Restaurant in the space formerly occupied by Vivona's. Vivona's was a good Italian restaurant for a while, but when they opened this location, the Vivona's started going downhill. It seemed the quality and portions of the food went way down and the price increased. Towards the end, the Vivona's employees acted like the customers were an annoyance, and the service was horrible. The last time I went to this Vivona's location, the whole place smelled like rotting meat, and then a few weeks later, both of the Vivona's were closed. There is still one Vivona's left on Park Ave. in Sanford with different owners.

After Vivona's closed, Caffe' Positano opened in their place a few months later. I ate there a week or two after they originally opened, and the restaurant is pretty much unchanged from when Vivona's was there. Unlike the Caffe' Positano in Apopka, this one seems to be geared more towards take out. I ate in the restaurant anyway, and ordered a pizza and garlic knots.

The garlic knots came out first, and had plenty of garlic on them. They weren't served with a side of tomato sauce like most Italian restaurants give with their knots, but I never use the sauce anyway.

The pizza came out soon enough. We ordered an eighteen inch pizza topped with half meatball. The first thing that I noticed was the the meatballs were cubed instead of sliced. I had the cheese half of the pizza so I won't comment on the taste of the meatballs, but cubed meatballs remind me a bit of how meatballs are served at places like Pizza Hut and Papa Johns. As for the cheese half of the pizza, it was a pretty good pie, with the exception of two complaints. The first being that the crust was a bit too crispy. It moved past the perfect pizza crust consistency and was too near the consistency of a cracker. My second complaint was that it sort of tasted like their oven needed to be cleaned. The pizza had a burnt charcoal-like taste that pizzas sometimes get if they are cooked on an oven that's due for a cleaning. Otherwise, it was a pretty good pizza. I would put this pizza a step above the pizza that Vivona's served while they were in their prime.


The next day I had some of the leftover pizza, and the moisture in the refrigerator softened the crispy crust a bit. It turned the pizza that was too crispy into a pizza with the perfect crust consistency. It's amazing how sometimes pizza improves the next day out of the refrigerator.