Return to Giordano's

Not long after my initial experience with Giordano's Pizza, I ended up eating at one of their other touristy locations with some visiting relatives. This Giordano's is in a Chinese themed strip mall on 192 in Kissimmee. The mall is near the former site of Splendid China, and although the park has sat abandoned for years, the mall still looks very pagoda-like. From the outside, it felt like Giordano's should have been a Chinese restaurant.

The meal started out with everyone at the table sharing cheese covered garlic bread and a chopped salad.


On this visit, two pizzas were ordered. One was a small stuffed pizza filled with green peppers and pepperoni. The other was a thin crust pizza topped with half mushrooms and half ground beef. I focused mainly on the stuffed pizza since that's what Giordano's is famous for. I liked the topping combination and noticed that their sauce was really tasty while eating this pie. The pizza was still really cheesy, but wasn't overflowing like on my last visit to their other location. Perhaps the pizza had a bit more time to set, or maybe they used less cheese and more toppings.

As for the thin crust pizza, don't bother. I tried a slice of the pie and it reminded me of Donatos Pizza. Donatos was the (former) McDonald's owned pizza chain that was very short lived in the Orlando area, and for a good reason too. Donatos' pizza was horrible. Definitely go for what Giordano's specializes in and get the Chicago Style stuffed pizzas.

Giordano's Stuffed Pizza

I have heard good things about Giordano's Pizza. It is Chicago style stuffed pizza with multiple layers of crust with the sauce on top. I really have very little experience with Chicago style pizza, and I had never tried a pizza quite like what Giordano's sells. The restaurant was on my list to try for a while, an I finally made it to the location on Apopka Vineland Road near Disney.

The meal started out with some garlic bread. There was a decent amount of garlic on here, unlike some other Italian restaurants that just use garlic butter and no actual garlic.

Although I was planning to just have a cheese pizza, I realized that would defeat the purpose of the stuffed pizza if it had nothing but cheese. It was agreed that my half of the pizza would have ground beef, pepperoni, and black olives. The meat was baked into the pie in between the layers of crust along with cheese. On the top layer, Giordano's put more cheese, sauce, and the black olives. I came across this video of how Giordano's makes their pizzas:



The pizza was definitely unique, but I think I still prefer the more traditional New York Style pizza. This pizza had far too much cheese that all oozed out of the slices. Perhaps if it was given time to set, the oozing wouldn't be as big of a problem, but it was still too much. One slice on this pizza probably had just as much cheese as a few slices of a traditional pizza. The crust on this pizza was pretty good though. It was sort of flaky, sort of like a pie crust rather than the bread that normally makes up a pizza crust.

I didn't think Giordano's pizza was anything great compared to traditional pizza, but it's definitely a novelty. Because of the uniqueness, I would gladly return and give their pizza another try. This visit to Giordano's also introduced me to another Chicago specialty that I now need to try: The Italian Beef Sandwich...