Boston Pizza

Boston Pizza

10 locations across Winnipeg

bostonpizza.com

Admittedly, I come to Boston more often than I like.  This is quite possibly the most popular restaurant chain in the Winnipeg right now and there’s always an occasion where people want to meet at Boston.  It’s also a safe place to take people who have no adventure for food—after all, how can you go wrong with pizza and pasta?

Safe is a perfect description for Boston’s food.  There’s nothing adventurous here and everything tastes ok.  The pizzas have an acceptable amount of goo on them (cheese and tomato sauce) to envelop the ingredients.  The sauce tastes rather bland but with enough cheese, you can get away with it. 

If you order a vegetable topping, plenty of it lies on the pie; they certainly don’t scrimp on the greens.  It doesn’t look very fresh and comes a bit overdone, but not scorched.  I would like to see more meat on the meat toppings but seeing as the beef and the Italian sausage both taste overly salty, perhaps you don’t want any more anyway.

As for the pasta, I’ve never experienced al dente noodles here—without exception, it’s been cooked to somewhere between limp and mush.  Again, that’s safe.  Most pasta aficionados will tell you to eat pasta with a bit of firmness, so that it still has enough life to cling to the sauce.  People without culinary depth will want it mushy and have all the ingredients melt together.

For specialty items, the Smoky Mountain Spaghetti and Meatballs gives you a mountain of noodles with three monster balls.  The spaghetti again is overdone, and so are the meatballs.  Firm and dry, they crumble apart at the bite.  There’s little flavour within them so you’ll need a lot of sauce to moisten and enhance them.

I often say that you cannot find genuine Cajun/Creole north of the Mason-Dixon line; that’s not always true but here in Boston, it definitely is.  Nothing about the Jambalaya Fettuccini tastes remotely Cajun.  They’re missing some of the key ingredients and they bypassed the essential cooking process.  It’s not a bad dish, but it’s definitely not true Jambalaya.  The shrimps taste reasonably well cooked but there’s a lot of grease to them.  Add in the fatty sausage and this is definitely not an option for someone on a health-reserved diet.

I’m not a big fan of chain restaurants but there are some that create good-excellent food.  This is not one of them.  In fact, Boston Pizza is exactly the kind of place that pumps out McFood by the tons that keep the masses coming, but keeps the foodies away.

** /5

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