Pizza from Papa Joe's (Lake Mary Blvd)

I ate dinner at the Papa Joe's located in the Target/Publix shopping center on Lake Mary Blvd in Lake Mary, FL. Their other Lake Mary location was already discussed here on Watch Me Eat, so I'll be comparing a bit.

My dining experience started with some bad air. One of the employees was sitting right outside the restaurant's entrance puffing away at a cigarette. Every customer entering the the restaurant had to walk through her cloud of smoke.

Once inside, garlic knots and pizza was ordered. I was impressed with the garlic knots. Compared to the garlic bread that I had at the other Papa Joe's, these were delicious. The was plenty of garlic, and the bread was cooked to perfection. No complaints here.

I wasn't very impressed with the pizza. I found the sauce to be really sweet (like at the other Papa Joes), and the pizza seemed very hastily made. Everything was uneven about the pie. Some areas of the pizza had hardly any sauce and too much cheese. Other areas had pools of sauce and no cheese. Even how the pie was sliced was uneven, resulting in some huge slices and some tiny slices. Overall, the pizza was edible, but was a disappointment after the good pizza that I had on my last Papa Joe's dining experience.

I did notice that Papa Joe's has some pizza lunch specials that I think I'll need to return for. They advertised having Grandmas pizza and stuffed pizza, both of which aren't very common in Florida.

On the way out, the same employee was still sitting outside, still smoking her cigarette. I wonder if she was getting paid to give lung cancer to Papa Joe's customers? I made sure to do lots of fake coughing as I walked by...

Papa Joe's Pizza (Lake Mary, FL)

Papa Joes used to be a local chain of really popular Italian restaurants in the Central Florida area. Their Altamonte Springs and Lake Mary Blvd locations almost always had a wait, and then they started to expand. As they opened up more and more restaurants in the area, their food and service became worse and worse. After a while the restaurants weren't worth eating at anymore. Eventually other people must have gotten the same feeling because the restaurants seemed to no longer have waits to eat, and Papa Joes closed all of their restaurants except for two in Lake Mary and one in Altamonte Springs.

I went to the Papa Joes in the Colonial Town Center in Lake Mary, FL for the first time in years. I had garlic bread and a cheese pizza. The garlic bread was disappointing and was nothing more than a roll topped with that garlic butter stuff and some parmesan cheese. I don't think there was any actual garlic.

Papa Joe's pizza seemed to go into a downward spiral back when I used to eat at the restaurants more often until it wasn't worth ordering anymore. When I ordered the pizza on this visit, I was surprised with the result. The pizza was actually pretty good. My only complaint was about the sauce. I found it to be way too sweet, but other than that the pie was pretty good. It didn't come close to King Umbertos standards (best pizza ever), but was definitely a few steps above many other local pizzas.