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Pizza
a winner at Action City
Owner
plays with recipes to produce well-crafted pies
Oct.
23, 2007
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You Go |
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Name:
Monkey in the Middle Pizza Co.
Address: At Action City, 2402 Lorch Ave.
Hours: 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sundays through Thursdays;
11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Fridays; 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. Saturdays.
Established: Fall 2005.
Owners: Tom Hahn and Mark Steil.
Chief pizza maker: Bob Tramblay.
Phone: 552-3333 (kitchen) or 838-9663 (Action City).
Reservations: No, but lots of room.
Smoking: No.
Wheelchair accessible: Yes.
Parking: In large lot on site.
Prices: 12-inch cheese pizza, $9.99, toppings $1 each;
16-inch cheese pizza, $12.99, toppings $1.50 each. Specialty
pizzas: 12-inch, $12.99 to $14.49; $16-inch, $16.99 to $18.49;
30-inch 'gorilla' pizza, $34.95, toppings $5 for each vegetable
and $7 for each meat.
Extras: Delivery available until 9 p.m. Sundays through
Thursdays and until 11 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. The delivery
charge is $1.50 per order regardless of size.
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Go-karts?
Laser tag? Bumper cars?
Nope.
As busy food writers, we go to Action City — Eau Claire’s
indoor entertainment center — only for the pizza.
When owners Tom Hahn and Mark Steil were getting Action City ready
to open, they advertised for “the world’s greatest pizza
maker.”
No luck.
So Steil, who once baked bagels commercially, decided to master
pizza. He researched, experimented, tasted, compared and sought
feedback from employees and friends.
The result? A one-of-a-kind pizzeria that makes its dough from scratch,
shapes each crust to order using a commercial dough sheeter, and
takes pride in creating unusual and well-crafted specialty pies.
Steil loves to tinker: testing new cheeses, daring to add something
more to crust or sauce, wondering if he could make better sausage
than he now can buy.
Bravo!
Steil’s current crust features honey and garlic and emerges
beautifully browned. Crusts we sampled ranged from 1/8-inch thin
(aggressively cracker-like) to 3/8-inch thick (wonderfully supple-crisp).
A little extra thickness helps some of the dough’s original
cell structure survive the sheeter. Such pizza has better chew and
taste.
The 16-inch Squeaky Wheel, $16.99, is a five-cheese-over-olive-oil
pizza enlivened by super-briny feta crumbles and dried basil.
The Buffalo Chicken Pizza, $17.49 for the 16-inch, tops a mix of
Frank’s RedHot Sauce and ranch dressing with mozzarella, young
provolone, Canadian bacon, salty black olives and dough-wrapped
chicken chunks tossed with more Frank’s.
The Five-O is a Hawaiian pizza returned from charm school: juicy
pineapple tidbits, mozzarella, Cheddar and Canadian and crisped
regular bacon atop an impressively sweet, garlicky barbecue sauce
that likes both cheese and fruit, $16.99 for the 16-inch.
Pepperoni and Canadian bacon are the best meats. The current sausage
bits, unfortunately, are just squishy pillows of slick-textured
pork. A tasty house-made sausage would be welcome.
OK, we confess: before heading home, we usually make time for Ms.
Pac-Man, the ancient video game. She knows a thing or two about
snacking under pressure.
Main Course, the Leader-Telegram's restaurant review
column, runs the fourth Sunday of the month. Diners' Notebook, a
sampling of favorite restaurant offerings, runs the second Tuesday
of the month.
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